Photographs and the Practice of History

Reviews / Votes

[Photographs and the Practice of History: A Short Primer] deserves to be treated as a veritable bible for how to think and write about photographs that have a history and histories that incorporate photographs, something that is likely to appeal to a wide variety of scholars interested in both history and photography but especially the history of photography. * The Journal of Modern History * The presence of photographs disrupts historical practice, and creates opportunities to re-think our relationship with the past. This is the argument Edwards, one of the world's leading photo historians, makes in this immensely powerful, dazzlingly learned, and eminently readable book. A must-read for every student of history! * Maiken Umbach, Professor of Modern History, University of Nottingham, UK * This is a provocative exploration of the subtle synergies between photographs and historical sensibility, written by a major historian of photography. Above all, it is a plea to think afresh about how photographs have radically reshaped our understandings of time, space and history in irreversible ways. * Paul Betts, Professor of Modern European History, St Antony's College, University of Oxford, UK * Through photographs, Edwards shoulders a multiplicity of conceptual and methodological threads-time, scale, presence, context, materiality-that all historians should approach with a new level of consciousness in their practice. Here, photographs are the alibi to address the real silences of history, opening floodgates of potentiality for its future practice. * Patricia Hayes, DSI/NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory, University of the Western Cape, South Africa * Photographs and the Practice of History is a profound reflection on how photographs have defined our relationship to the past and its implications in the present, from the foremost scholar in the field. Deftly written and alive with questions on the nature of history itself, this is a book every historian, and anyone who works with photographs, should read. * Christina Riggs, Professor of the History of Visual Culture, Durham University, UK *