One of the persistent features of historical writing about the sciences in the last twenty years has been the concern of a number of historians who insist on the need for a new awareness of the role of visual images and image making. The author believes that, rather than reducing the analysis of visual culture to a single set of principles, the point of the academic study of scientific images is the recognition of their heterogeneity, the different circumstances of their (...) production, and the variety of cultural and social functions they serve. This essay challenges historians to discover new ways of framing the historical meanings of scientific images within the larger contexts of signifying symbols, images, and mediations that make up culture. The study of nineteenth‐century practices of building collections of scientific photographs provides the background for a discussion of the significance of picture archives in the history of science, of the historical mechanisms that frame some pictures as “scientific” and others as “unscientific,” and of the need for further research on how scientific images generate meaning. (shrink)

The status of photographs as keystones of historical explanation has become a topic of urgent intellectual and cultural interest around the world, at the same time as methods of shaping historical narratives are also changing in ways that compel attention to the employment of photographs in historiography. By exposing the questions we ought to raise about all historical evidence, photographs reveal not simply the potential and limits of photography as a historical source, but the potential and limits of all historical (...) sources and historical inquiry as an intellectual project. As the papers in this issue make apparent, this is precisely the promise and ultimate potential of the historical study of photographs—that it pushes their interpreters to the limits of historical analysis. This essay, which serves as an introduction to the Theme Issue, contextualizes issues raised by the articles and offers a critical synthesis of their impact on future scholarship about photography in historical analysis. (shrink)