12 30 p. M. Welcome. I have the happy task of introducing your president and my friend marnie sandweiss. We will present this room and tell the story of marnie and me and her work, which got us all here. Let me start with the magical alchemy of graduate school. All of us leadheaded thinkers turned into scholars and teachers. The process works Something Like this. Imagine a group of students as a cohort. The cohort becomes classmates. The classmates become colleagues. And once in a while they become lifelong friends. So, colleagues, cohort, classmate, colleague, and that golden thing, a friend. I am cheating a little bit because she came to yale 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. [applause] not a cohort exactly. We did become friends, puzzling throughdings, yawning 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 nevada, orout th timothy osullivan. We survived our basement years, scattered, and became colleagues, solving problems for our students, for each other , and for the professional organizations that support our work. So, cohort, classmate, collie, colleague, but for me, we became friends, most important. A last bit of graduate school alchemy that knit the strange world of ideas where we do our work 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. Why are you reading my books, she said. I learn stuff, i said. I will tell you briefly some of the things i have learned. Was a biography gilpinphotographer laura. On many 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 she will tell you this legend has it her hiring was an accident. The interviewer confused or with her 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. How about the french in the mississippi valley. She wrote it up in a couple of weeks, defended it, and moved to texas. In fort worth, she published on texas photography and the mexican war. She curated different exhibitions. 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 a means to illustrate ideas presented in a text. Photography is an interpretive act, she said. A primary source as crucial to history as a descriptive diary or legal document. She wrote a book about gilpin, but she wanted her phd. Now, i have a story that i have told that she tells me is a legend, and it is wrong. That she finished this beautiful book about the photographer, came back to new haven and said here is my dissertation and in a brilliant stroke of reverse engineering, wrote a proposal, defended it, and turn in the dissertation. She tells me that isnt true. Actually began the book, wrote a proposal, but i still say this. Its probably the fastest dissertation ever to come out of the yale History Department. She left to direct the art museum at amherst college, but continued to write about photography and the visual history of the American West. Editing and contributing to half a dozen books, including the awardwinning history of the American West. They are here. She has always been a scholar at heart, not a museum administrator. O she left she finally joined 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 impressed 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. Claimuck to this bold through the archives and big stories of the American West. No surprise, research on photography led her to work on the expeditions that mapped the western landscapes and the career of clarence king. Her accounts of kings life passing strange a gilded age tale of love and deception returnse color line to the biographical arts she learned about inviting about gilpin and the archival patients she had mastered. What animates passing strange though is race, the color line that snakes its way through the postemancipation United States. Her own work in a way a survey of that color line. It shakes her extraordinary project, the webbased collaborative that she led him on princeton and slavery. Videos, stories unearthed have left us with a campus changed by the materials they have found to record and represent the many roles of enslaved people in the history of that university. So let me end this intellectual wedding toast by turning to las vegass other industry, until you one other story about your president as a gambler. [laughter] you wonder about this. It did happen. I went to see her in santa fe. Just as she had to fort worth. It worked again in santa fe. Come see me, she insisted, sure that the beauties of the wintryst were wet my soul needed at the time. And we took ourselves on a gambling adventure to the camel rock casino. Back in those pretechnological days, we each invested 20 in quarters and armed with our grubby plastic cups spent the evening playing the slots. We amused ourselves for a few hours, our dutiful souls taming the wild world of gambling and turning it into an evening outing. As she took no risks at the casino floor, not so with her work, which digs into the archive, opens eyes. I tell you, her work and you will learn stuff. So let me give the podium to my imagined cohort, sleepy classmate, my generous colleague , and 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 scales, from intimate encounters to imperial schemes. So raise a toast of whatever is on your table to her talk history, thinking about, and with photographs. [applause] prof. Sandweiss thank you, ann. When i first came to this meeting 40 years ago, i never imagined standing up your. In fact probably did not imagine still standing. But intellectual curiosity in the sense of professional obligation brought me here in the first place, but its the friendships that have brought me back. I want to say at the outset, thanks to all of you. Thank you all for making this such a congenial and welcoming home for me. It has been an honor to serve as your president. [applause] now, the french historian once said there are two kinds of andorians, parachutists truffle 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 reshaped the new world, but you can miss things from up there. From up high, its hard to see the rhythms of daily life. From the Space Shuttle might spy the smoke plume from of all iceland, but you would be hardpressed to understand the trouble of those in an airport in rome. Conversely, those very local circumstances are what interest truffle hunters. A truffle hunter may not see how atmospheric currents disperse the volcanic ash above the peninsula, but she might learn something really interesting by eavesdropping on a conversation in the airport bar. So let me confess, i am afraid of heights. By temperament i am a trouble truffle 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. Now long before the invention of photography in 1839, people in the western half of the north American Continent used visual means to make sense of the world. In petroglyphs and paintings with ceramic vessels and. Evotional art but the settlement of the west in the United States largely coincides with the invention and spread of photography. The new american region and 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. We imagine California Gold , dustbowlttlers 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. Lets ask from the perspective of our own field how might historians think about and with photographs . Now 19thcentury observers were quick to see a connection between photography and history, and as the historical profession move to Scientific Method in the late 19th century, photographs seem to be the perfect documents for this new age of objective fact. The essayist Oliver Wendell holmes, among the mediums most 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 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 clothesline. Later in 1888, the local surgeon 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 records. It is by far the most accurate, the cheapest of methods known at the present day. More than any other graphic process, he said, it was nearly free from error or prejudice of the operator. By 1902, one of the president s americanof the Historical Association put it dwell in an age of prose. Since darwin, it has been no more possible to produce a crop that it is for those who picture running horses to expel from the minds what they have learned the photographs of animal locomotion. Precision of photographs of galloping horses provided the evidence that historians needed for this history. They were useful antidote to what jamison called the presentations of human life that marked the writing of an earlier age. As 19thcentury commentators presumed, historians and photographers have a lot in common. And 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 subjective observation of the world, not a purely objective one, that makes historians and photographers kindred spirits. Historians and photographers operate with different toolkits. 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 stand in fundamentally different relationships to their subjects. Historians are always looking back. And photographers are always picturing a present, albeit an evanescent one that slips away the moment the sensitized plate or film is exposed. So consider the differences with which historians and photographers describe the world. Lets focus on a single photograph. For some time i have been exploring the stories made at fort laramie in the dakota territory in 1868 by Alexander Gardner. On either side of an unidentified girl stands six men, members of the Peace Commission to negotiate a peace treaty with tribes on the northern plains. Gardner made the picture as for part of the series that documents the work in the daily lives of the native peoples and mixedrace families that lived there. I pondered the challenges gardner faced in making the photograph, as opposed to those i faced in writing about it. I thought about what he knew in contrast to what i know. He knew how hot it was on this early may day. The weather records dont start for a few more months. He knew the sounds of these peoples voices. The men a 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 site. With the tools of an historian, i can uncover connections that neither the photographer nor the subjects could fully discern. Know, for example, that the child, whose name he did not record, was sophie miss , 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 halfbrother. 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 , standing just to the right of sophie, 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 divert some of it to sophias father as compensation for some of his stolen horses. Is not to highlight my knowledge or demonstrate that historians of photographers can have different needs for the same picture. I want to also argue that historians have a fundamentally different relationship to time than photographers do. Both, of course, can observe temporal change as part of the immediate experience, but historians look the onslow personal. Observing events across time is fundamental to their craft our craft. Historians can compress actions occurring across space and time, and with the benefit of hindsight, they can recover moments and develop links between discrete events. And looking back they can reconsider people or events deemed uninteresting at the time, but valuable in retrospect. Remember the unnamed photographer . He might 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. If i could walk out alone the and hisriver with him subjects, i would surely learn something new in interesting about them all. Still, it is Historical Research that lets me know more about young sophies family, history , then gardner does in 1868, and because i can see into her familys future, i can know that her fathers lawsuits will remain unresolved when he dies more than 30 years later and i can know that one of her sons , the first to attend law school, will later press his grandfathers claims. The digital era, it is hard to shake assumptions about the literalism of photography that first attracted historians to it as a New Historical document. Photographs seemed to offer an unmediated glimpse of the past. Much we know about photographys ability or the ability to manipulate the scene. Are historical artifacts. But photographs they are not history itself. History is dynamic. Fluid. Inherently about change over time, and photographs are static. But their meanings change. In december of 1869, when general william t sherman, standing third from the left, thanked gardner for sending him copies of his fort laramie views, he highlighted the documentary value, writing that many of them are beautiful pictures, but the details 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 a history of their own. And historians need to Pay Attention not just to the visual information they contain but to the context, materiality, and their shifting uses. Now every photograph is a moment seized from the continuum of now, 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, that the dictator has become wellknown, though it has little historical importance. Only because of several photographs made during the summer of 1864. And 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 that the moment fixed to the photographic image holds great explanatory power. But that is not always true. Photographs document consequences more readily than causes. They capture particular material subjects, but not abstract ideas. They depict fleeting moments, but they do not explain how they came about. Gardners photograph of the six Peace Commissioners standi