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PHOTOGRAPHY AS HISTORY:
COLLECTING, NARRATING, AND PRESERVING PARIS, 1870-1970
by
Catherine E. Clark
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)
August 2012
Copyright 2012 Catherine E. Clark
Object Description
| Title | Photography as history: collecting, narrating, and preserving Paris, 1870-1970 |
| Author | Clark, Catherine E. |
| Author email | catherec@usc.edu;catherine.e.clark@gmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | History |
| School | College of Letters, Arts And Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2012-05-10 |
| Date submitted | 2012-07-13 |
| Date approved | 2012-07-15 |
| Restricted until | 2019-07-13 |
| Date published | 2019-07-13 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Schwartz, Vanessa R. |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Accampo, Elinor A. Ethington, Philip J. Norindr, Panivong |
| Abstract | “Photography as History: Collecting, Narrating, and Preserving Paris, 1870-1970” argues that photography was the first visual medium to have a major impact on historical interpretation. Although professional historians have only recently become interested in the power of photography to document the past – as part of history’s “visual turn” –, photographs have compelled and entranced archivists, librarians, curators, journalists, and amateur and popular historians since the nineteenth century. The history of their ideas about and uses of images, and especially photographs, as historical documents in the context of twentieth-century Parisian history sheds light on one of history’s central methodological and paradigmatic concerns: the discipline’s status as objective “science” versus poetic reconstruction of the past. ❧ Despite professional historians privileging written texts as the fundamental source of evidence in the Western tradition, at the turn of the century, archivists and amateurs alike seriously and systematically began collecting images, and this practice remained integral to twentieth-century municipal and popular historical practices. Images figured prominently in municipal and private efforts to document the contemporary city. Municipal officials, historians, and publishers also relied on them to narrate and reconstruct Paris’s past in the displays of the city history museum, in illustrated books and pamphlets, and in large-scale historical exhibitions. These amateur and municipal visual historical practices demonstrate sophisticated and changing ideas about both the theoretical and the practical relationships between images and history. Municipal and commercial photo archives, whose contents were in part driven by the demands of amateur and municipal historians, have made the contemporary scholarly interest in the use of photos as historical documents possible. ❧ Photography, in particular, came to play a key role in the urban visual historical record after mid-century. Yet rather than replacing other forms of illustration and visual documents in twentieth-century popular and municipal visual histories of Paris, photographs worked in complex and shifting relation to other types of pictures in order to scientifically and objectively document as well as romantically reconstruct the past. In doing so, they not only influenced how Parisians thought about the city’s past and how they pictured it but also ensured that these images shaped how they lived their own lives – especially in deeply-charged moments such as the liberation after World War II or the festivities surrounding the city’s 2,000th birthday in 1951. ❧ Based on extensive archival research in Parisian sources ranging from photo collections, newsreels, and illustrated books to municipal and institutional archives, municipal officials’ private papers, the records of publishers and photographers, book reviews, and newspaper coverage of key public historical festivals, “Photography as History” tells a previously untold material and social history of picture taking, publishing, and collecting while considering issues of intellectual history as a contribution to the debate about the status of the image in historiography. |
| Keyword | photography; Paris; historiography; visual culture; archives |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Clark, Catherine E. |
| Physical access | The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given. |
| Repository name | University of Southern California Digital Library |
| Repository address | USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 7002, 106 University Village, Los Angeles, California 90089-7002, USA |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume4/etd-ClarkCathe-953.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | PHOTOGRAPHY AS HISTORY: COLLECTING, NARRATING, AND PRESERVING PARIS, 1870-1970 by Catherine E. Clark A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (HISTORY) August 2012 Copyright 2012 Catherine E. Clark |
