TY - JOUR
AU - Quirke,, Carol
AB - From 2009 to 2014 Matthew Frye Jacobson crisscrossed the United States, taking thousands of photographs. He documented a wide range of issues roiling the republic: intractable racism, a yawning wealth gap, xenophobia, violence, and a media-saturated, surveillant nation. He tracked citizens’ movements challenging inequalities, and the rise of reactionary counter movements. In The Historian's Eye he publishes a selection of these photographs and nearly as many meditations about the nature of U.S. history and its shaping of contemporary America. In place of traditional scholarship, Jacobson wanted to “see and frame” the nation's social conditions (pp. 154, 5). Additionally, the author speculates about how photography as medium shapes conceptions of past and present, how to interpret photographs, and how scholarly and documentary inquiry intersect and diverge. The book consists of six photo-essays, with introductory and concluding reflections. The Historian's Eye explores Barack Obama's iconicity, the financial crisis, and vacant storefronts; it records a road trip taken just after Obama's inauguration, probes the rabid resistance to his presidency, and considers the hopes invested in the forty-fourth president. The author encounters industrial brownfields and shopping carts adrift in shuttered malls, Occupy encampments and Tea Party rallies, vernacular war monuments, and border fences. Our polarized nation confronts a “withered sense of commonweal,” and Jacobson is preoccupied with the tension between “better history,” words he captured painted on a New York City wall, and someone's graffittied rejoinder, “bitter future” (p. 7). Jacobson only briefly detours into the rich body of photo criticism. For nearly half a century, scholars charged that the documentary tradition was one built, in the artist-critic Martha Rosler's words, on “the backs of the exploited” (Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts [on Documentary Photography],” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001, by Rosler, 2004, p. 185). The visual turn in much scholarship drew on this critique and led many historians, themselves anxious about interpreting images, to approach the image cynically. Jacobson reminds us of the photograph's “unstable meaning” and observes that taking photographs can be considered “disaster porn” (pp. 76, 110). He concludes that historians must attend to historical change, illuminate potential as well as loss. In describing his decision to shoot in black and white instead of color, Jacobson maintains the historicity of the former and his commitment to promote contemplation. He ignores scholarship on color's meaning for the documentary, and dodges an opportunity to identify presuppositions. Given historians’ iconophobia and Jacobson's articulated aims, a fuller treatment of photographic theory would enrich this analysis. Wilson Hicks, Life Magazine's photo-editor, coined the term “the third effect,” and Jacobson excels at creating meaning by integrating words and pictures. A superb example is his photograph of a 1959 Cadillac in a used-car lot, under a sales sign that swipes at government, “Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for” (p. 111). This photo and accompanying meditation explore the flash of American consumerism, postwar prosperity, tax policy, and states’ rights theory from Barry Goldwater to the Tea Party movement. Jacobson witnesses how the past makes our present, then he shows us. © The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Historian's Eye: Photography, History, and the American Present
JO - Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaaa279
DA - 2020-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-historian-s-eye-photography-history-and-the-american-present-s1qm6Gohl9
SP - 557
EP - 557
VL - 107
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -