The Historian's Perspective: How Photographs and Images Create History

How can art, graphics, photographs, cinema, and other media be used to give meaning to lives lived in other times? How to teach photography today? How to read the era through photography? The main point that this book strives to... support and illustrate is that images, like texts and oral testimonies, are an important historical source. They capture the testimony of eyewitnesses. There is nothing new in this idea, as evidenced by the famous image known as the "Portrait of the Arnolfini," depicting a husband and wife, in the National Gallery in London. The portrait is signed: Jan van Eyck fuit hic, "Jan van Eyck was here," as if the artist acted as a witness at the wedding. Ernst Gombrich called the "principle of the eyewitness" a rule that existed in various cultures, according to which, starting from the ancient Greeks, an artist could depict only what an eyewitness could actually see from a certain point at a specific moment.