Using Visual Evidence (review)

Back in the turbulent fifteen century, after Johannes Gutenberg produced the first European printing press—a cumbersome machine that squeezed movable type into a rudimentary chase and, following some ink dabbing, produced one laborious page at a time—the modern book finally arrived. While not for everyone (only a handful could read), these carefully bound volumes, with their ornate typography and calligraphic flourishes, created a permanent record of events that the learned could examine and disseminate. Without question, letterpress was here to stay and in a few years the indisputable authority of print established. After all, who could challenge the veracity of German black letter? Truth became print or was it the other way around? Did print transform itself into truth?

Later this written record required interpretation (or clarification) and modern history emerged. With erudite men—there was rarely a women—sitting center stage, scholars pored over the letter pressed page looking for explanations of past events, hoping to elucidate distant times or faraway places. With print as their primary source, historians proclaimed their own reality by expostulating an imperious methodology: to understand the past, one must read books. With the printed record as a drum-beating cicerone, history marched forward.

Is this the complete picture? Can we say for certain that print embodies the reference point for historical analysis? What about other factors? How did the world exist before the Gutenberg Galaxy? And do not forget literacy. Even with thousands of books in circulation, most people, eking out a precarious living in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, could not understand a single word. But sketches, paintings, etchings, lithographs, caricatures, and other visual representations were clear and concise. For much of the population, these images became history.

How significant are these images? Does visual evidence offer a better understanding of history? Are visual texts on the same level as printed words? Does photography offer a lucid perception of past events than personal narrative? What happens when motion pictures and television become household fixtures? To answer these questions (and many more), two media historians—drawing upon years of detailed research—have compiled a definitive anthology. Clearly, Using Visual Evidence presents a unique interpretation of historical analysis where thirteen writers, under the editorship of Richard Howells and Robert W. Matson, offer strong ideas about a subject that is often overlooked.

For example, while printed information existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries about the Pilgrim and Puritan Massachusetts settlements, virtually no text conveyed the same meaning as George Henry Boughton's established painting, Pilgrims Going to Church, an oil canvas communicating the hopes, fears, and aspirations of a religious-minded group isolated on foreign soil. In a similar vein—back in the Old World—British political cartoonists rollicked numerous office seekers with satirical drawings depicting individual foibles and national weaknesses in a manner far more effective than any printed article.

With the emergence of photography, a new dimension was added. Rudimentary at first, black and white prints took viewers into flawless vistas of comprehension with their detailed images of life elsewhere. Dorothea Lange's Depression collection, for instance, especially Migrant Mother, recorded a point in time that no written format could vaguely approach. Soon, motion pictures appeared and with their offspring, the newsreel, relegated print to a secondary role. And, finally, television, with all of its McLuhan twists, explained (or, created) the historical imperative, while off in the wings the advertising world smirked, realizing that consumers—with their cause and effect mentality—responded to images rather than text.

Collectively, these eleven essays shed new light on how human information is processed and, in their own way, echo Boss Tweed's caustic sentiments when, in 1871, he bellowed that his constituents "don't know how to read but they can't help seeing those damned pictures." Tweed was right and his scandalous behavior, featured prominently in Harper's Weekly, cost him the election. Why wouldn't it? Didn't he understand the Chinese proverb that one picture is worth 1,000 words?

In all...