This. Imagine a group of students as a cohort. The cohort becomes class meet. classmates. Once in a while they become lifelong friends. So, colleagues, cohort, classmate, colleagues, and that golden thing, a friend. I am cheating a little bit because she came to yell to study with Harold Lamarr a year after me and she was in the History Department and i was in that ragtag group in american studies. Not a cohort exactly. We did become friends, puzzling over readings, yachtings brilliant, but sometimes excruciating seminars. Western history, some of you may know, was taught in the basement. And on friday afternoons. The slow drone of graduate students, our own included we survived our basement years, scattered, and became colleagues, solving problems about students for each other. So, cohort, classmate, collie, but for me, we became friends, most important. A last bit of graduate school alchemy that knit the strange world of ideas into the world of spouses, partners, families, and children where we live our lives. This long friendship made me lucky enough to read drafts of her books along the way, yellowing pages still turn up in my files. I read them and i read them again last week. I will tell you some of the things i have learned. Laura gilpin of austrias book one a slew of awards and i do not have time to tell you all of them. But theres a story. She abandoned her colleagues and moved to fort worth to become the curator of photography. Legend has it that he will tell you this legend has it her hiring was an accident. The interviewer confused or with another graduate student. True or not, the museum had a lucky break and she had a job offer, but with a hitch. She needed to defend a dissertation proposal, so she seems to have dreamed up an idea. She defended it and moved to texas. In fort worth, she published on texas photography. When laura gilpin left her estate to the museum, she had an archive, a subject, and a chance to work out her conviction that photography was more than opportunity to present things in a text. Photography was an interpretive act, she said. She wrote a book about gilpin, but she wanted her phd. I have a story. She tells me thats the legend and is wrong that she finished this beautiful book, came back to new haven and said here is my dissertation and in a brilliant book, wrote a proposal, defended it, and turn in the dissertation. She told me she began the book, wrote the proposal, but i still say this. Its probably the fastest dissertation ever to come out of the yale History Department. She continued to write about the visual history of the American West. Including the awardwinning history of the American West. But she has always been a historian at heart. She finally join the History Department at princeton. Through all those museum years, she was working on the big book on photography and the American West. Print the legend came out in 2002. It swept up a batch of prizes and readers with his contention that the conquest and development of the American West could not be understood without reckoning with the Simultaneous Development of the history of photography. She pursued this claim through archives. Note prior, research on photography led her to work on the expeditions that mapped the western landscape and the career of clarence king. Her accounts of kings life passing strange a gilded age tale returns to the biographical arts she learned about inviting about guilt then gilpin. What animates passing strange though is race, the color line that snakes its way through the postemancipation United States. Her own work and away, a survey of that color line. It shapes the webbased collaborative that she led him princeton on slavery. Maps, graphs, it videos, left us with a campus changed by the materials they have found to record and represent enslaved people in the history of that university. Let me end this intellectual wedding toast by turning to las vegass other history and tell you one story about your president as a gambler. You wonder about this. This worked in santa fe come see me, she insisted, sure that the beauties of the southwest were what might win three sold needed at the time, and we took ourselves on a gambling adventure to the Camel Rock Casino in the pretechnological days. We invested 20 in quarters and armed with our grubby plastic cups spent the evening playing slots. We turned it into an evening outing. It opens eyes. I will tell you, read her work and you will learn stuff. Let me give the podium to my sleepy classmate, my generous colleague in my brilliant friend and let you listen to the next iteration of our marvelous weave of the visual, the verbal, the stories that play across history from intimate encounters to imperial schemes. Raise a toast of whatever is on your table to her talk seeing history thinking about and with photographs. [applause] thank you, ann. When i first came to this meeting 40 years ago, i never imagine standing up your. I probably did not imagines will standing. At still standing. But its the friendships that have brought me back. I want to say at the outset, thanks to all of you. Things to all for making this such a welcoming thanks to all for making this such a welcoming thing for me. It has been an honor to serve as your president. [applause] professor sandweiss now, the french historian emmanuel e said once there were two types of historians parachutists and trouble hunters trouble hunters. He did not elaborate, but we can infer what he meant. The parachutist can see large patterns and track the movement of events, people, pathogens, ideas across vast stretches of space and time. You need to be a parachutist to see how old world germs or animals reshape the world, but you can miss thing from angstrom up there. From up high, its hard to see the rhythms of daily life. You might spy the smoke plume from of all kaine no, but you would be hardpressed to understand the trouble of volcanic ash. Conversely, very local circumstances interest truffle hunters. A truffle hunter may not see how the volcanic currents dispersed the volcanic ash, but she might learn something really interesting by eavesdropping on a conversation in the airport bar. I am afraid of heights. By temperament i am a trouble hunter. I am not asserting this as a superior historical practice. It simply what i like to do. This is the practice to which my own peculiar career led me. I invariably had to start with the thing itself. And over and over again i learned that small objects lead to big stories. In petroglyphs and paintings with ceramic vessels and devotional art the settlement of the west in the United States largely coincides with the invention and spread of photography. The new medium came of age and through photography Many Americans encountered the west for the first time and photographs still shaped our mental images of the west. Settlers, dustbowl farms. Nonetheless, as western historians we have been more apt to use these photographs as illustrations than to think about them as primary sources that help us answer central questions about the western past. We shape the contemporary conversations about how to understand photographs. Lets reclaim that turf. How might historians think about and with photographs . 19th century observers as historical observers look toward a new method, photographs seem to be the perfect documents for this new age of objective fact. The essayist Oliver Wendell holmes, among the mediums most this dude early critics astute early critics, regarded photographs as aides that incidentally preserve the details that might not have interested contemporary observers. Theoretically, he wrote, a perfect photograph is added to lily absolutely inexhaustible. In a nod to the west he argued that the accidents of life left photographs and infinite charm. The oldest eastern city, in the myths of the shanties at pike speech and stretching across the courtyards of damascus, wherever man lives with the decencies of civilization, you will find the close line clothesline. Later, the local search and George Francis address the Antiquarian Society in worcester, massachusetts on photography as an aid to local history and called on amateur photographers to aid the work of future historians. He exhorted them to make a systematic Photographic Survey of new englands developing industries and he explained there can be no question that photography is the best method of securing these graphic method. It is by far the most accurate, the cheapest known to the present day and more than any other process, he said, it was nearly free from error caused ivy riots or prejudice of the operator. By 1902, one of the president s of the Historical Association could put it this way we dwell in an age of pros. Since darwin, it has been no more possible to produce a crop of than for those who picture running horses to expel from the minds what they have learned from photographs about animal locomotion. Today darwin and photographs of galloping horses provided the data that historians needed and they were useful antidote to what jamison called the imaginative human life that documented in earlier age. What bound them together was a commitment to scientific observation and the neutral recording of fact. Now though, we view these professions differently and we might observe it is the subject to subjective object of the world that makes it historians and photographers kindred spirits. There is no mistaking a pen for a camera, but they make similar decisions about whether to reveal their presence, what to highlight, what to exclude. Nonetheless, they have fundamentally different relationships to their subjects. Historians are always looking back. Photographers are always picturing the present, albeit an evanescent one that slips away the moment the sensitize film is exposed. Consider the differences with which historians and photographers describe the world. Lets focus on a photograph. For some time i have been exploring the stories made at fort laramie in the dakota territories by Alexander Gardner. And unidentified girl stands six men, members of the Peace Commission to negotiate a peace treaty on the northern plains. Gardner made the picture as for the commissioners work, as well as the daily lives of the native peoples and mixedrace families that lived there. I considered the challenges gardner made and making the photograph. I thought about what he knew in contrast to what i know. He knew how hot it was on this early may day. He knew the sounds of these peoples voices. He knew what the men made for breakfast. He knew these people. But as an historian, i can know far more about their lives than he did. I can watch them walk into this picture and i can follow them as they walk away, out of a photographers sight. With the tools of an historian, i can uncover connections that neither the photographer nor the subjects could fully discern. I can know that the child, whose name he did not record, was sophie, and i can know that her uncle would become the Prime Minister of quebec. I can know that there was an army charge on a lakota village that resulted in the murder of sophies app rather. I can know that a raid in directly led to a marriage that would last to close to half a century and become sophies parents. I can know that her father is, at the moment this pictures been made, employing John B Sanborn as an attorney to get federal compensation for property lost in indian raids, and i can know that general sanborn, ostensibly representing the federal government in negotiating payments to the assembled tribes, will get a cut of that money if he can diaper some of it to sophia possis father as compensation for his stolen horses. The point is not to highlight my or toical knowledge illustrate that photographers and historians can have different needs for the same picture. I also want to argue historians have a fundamentally different relationship to time than photographers do. Pose can observe temporal change is part of immediate experience, but historians look the onslow personal beyond the personal and observing events is fundamental to their craft, to our craft. With the benefit of hindsight they can recover his little moments and links between discrete events and looking back they can reconsider people or events deemed uninteresting at the time, but valuable in retrospect. The unnamed photographer may have inadvertently captured the clotheslines at pikes peak, but its up to the historian to explain whose clothes they were, and who washed them and hung them out to dry. It is Historical Research that lets me know more about young sophies family, history than gardner does in 1868, and because i can see into her fathers future, i can know that his lawsuits will remain unresolved when he dies more than 30 years later and i can know that one of her sons will later press his grandfather us claims. Even in the digital era, it is grandfathers claims. It isn the digital era, hard to shake the 19thcentury century assumptions about the literalism of photography. Offer anhs seem to unmediated glimpse of the past, no matter how much we know about photographys ability photographers ability to manipulate the scene. Photographs are historical artifacts. They are not history itself. History is dynamic. Fluid, inherently about change over time. Photographs are static. Their meanings change. In december of 1869, when general sherman standing third from the left thanks gardner for sending him copy of the fort laramie views, he highlighted the documentary value of the pictures, writing that many are beautiful pictures, but all give the tales of indian dress that will be valuable for some time to come. When the daughter of a sketch artist connected to the Peace Commissioners described the photograph more than half a century after it was made, she spoke of it more metaphorically as a ceremonial picture in the nature of a pledge to the future. On the 150th anniversary of the 1868 fort laramie treaty, gardners images served as the markers of broken promises. Photographs have histories of their own. Historians need to Pay Attention not just to the visual information they contain but to the context, materiality, and shifting uses. Every photograph is a moment seized from the continuum of flowing time and fixed for posterity. It focuses our attention on what we can see and it can be tempting to decide something is important simply because we have a photograph of it. Civil war scholars note for example the dictator has become wellknown, even though it has little historical importance. Only because of several photographs made during the summer of 1864. As western historians we might ask, what stories do we emphasize . Especially in textbooks. Because we can visualize them with photographs. Conversely, what stories might we overlook because there exists no photographs to anchor them in a particular time and place . Because we value the evidence we have at hand, we can be led to imagine the moment fixed to the photographic image holds great explanatory power. But that is not always true. Photographs document consequences more readily them more readily than causes. They capture particular material subjects but not abstract ideas. Moments butfleeting do not explain how they came about. Gardners photograph of the six Peace Commissioners does not tell us anything about the tense negotiations between the sioux and federal Peace Commissioners sent to force them on a reservation. It cannot hint at the betrayal that will follow seven years later when the federal government reneges on its promise to make it a part of the reservation. It cannot predict the moment in 2016 when the federal board of geographic names will take general harneys name off the highest peak in the black hills and rename the mountain after the lakota profit. Nonetheless, this photograph of seven people, the oldest born during john adams administration. The youngest dime during Franklin Roosevelts presidency invites the historian in to understand what is there and explore what is not. The photograph certainly drew me into the archives and that is where i found sophies parents and discovered both of them came into fort laramie in the aftermath of general harneys attack. Harneys actions set in motion the events that led them to meet mary and raise a large family. His frontier violence triggered their frontier love. The photograph alone does not tell that story. It does leave me there. Over the past 50 years as photography has become an increasingly ubiquitous part of modern life, the media increased attention from critics and become central to a host of disciplinary subfields including visual anthropology, media studies, visual culture, visual studies, these fields all focused largely on the analysis of contemporary images. Not historical ones. Even in fields like memory studies where historical images can play a central role, the place for photographs remains unexplored. Photographs can be handmade to what we call collective memory. A deeply felt set of convictions resistant to change. They can also be handmades of history which employs the more skeptical and critical view of the past. Photographs are not inherently one thing or the other. They derive their meanings from the ways we use them. American textbooks for example have long celebrated the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad with photographs like east and west shaking hands and joining. Which depicts the celebrants of the golden spikes ceremony of 1869 excludes the chinese laborers who made most of the tracks from california and utah. In the late 19th century, andrew russells picture supported the evolving collective memory of the Transcontinental Railroad as a triumph of american industry. In recent years however, as historians turn away from the triumph narrative, the photograph finds a new place in historical writing. Once valued as evidence of the nations technological prowess, the photograph now has value because of the very exclusion of the Chinese Workers reveals to us so much about contemporary racial thought