Behind those pictures to study and understand the American West, she has been studying and writing about photographs for 40 years, and argued that more historians should use photographic archives in their work. One minute past 12 30. Welcome, everyone. I have the happy task of introducing your president and my friend, marnie sandweiss. Im going to give you a version of what i have been describing as an intellectual wedding toast. We will present this room as a vegas wedding chapel and tell the story of marnie and me and marnies work, which got us all here. Let me start with the magical alchemy of graduate school. Us leadheaded thinkers turned into golden tongued scholars, writers, and teachers. Picture a process that works Something Like this. An Admissions Committee imagines 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 marnie 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. Not a cohort, exactly. We did become friends, puzzling over readings, yawning over brilliant, but sometimes excruciating seminars. Western history, some of you may know, was taught in the basement. As a tribute to Howard Lamarr on friday afternoons. The slow drone of graduate students, our own included, listened to me. Marnie a lot better on watkins or timothy osullivan. We survived our basement years, scattered, and became colleagues, commiserating, solving problems for our students, for each other, and for the professional organizations that support our work. So, cohorts, classmates, colleagues, but for me, marnie and i became friends. 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 marnies 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 book, marnie says . I learned stuff, i said. Im going to tell you briefly some of the things i have learned. Marnies first book was a biography of the photographer laura gilpin, laura gilpin an enduring grace published in 1986. It won a slew of awards and i do not have time to tell you all of them. But theres a story. Marnie abandoned her classmates in new haven and moved to fort worth to become a curator of photography at the amon carter museum. Legend has it that should i tell you this . Legend has it her hiring was an accident. The interviewer confused 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 weeks defended it and moved to , texas. In fort worth, she published on texas photography. And the daguerreotypes of the mexican war. When laura gilpin left her estate to the museum, marnie 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 insists, a primary source as crucial to history as a descriptive diary or a legal document. She wrote a book about gilpin, but she wanted her phd. I have a story that i have told, but marnie tells me thats the legend and it is wrong, that she finished this book, a beautiful book about the photographer, came back to new haven, and said, here is my dissertation, and did a brilliant stroke of reverse engineering, 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. It is probably the most elegant dissertation ever to come out of the yale History Department. She left amon carter to direct an art museum at amherst, but continued to write about the visual history of the American West, editing and contributing to a half dozen books, including the awardwinning oxford history of the American West. But marnie has always been a scholar at heart, not a Museum Administrator or a president of a learned society. She joined the History Department at princeton. Through all those museum years, she was working on a big book on photography and the American West in the 19th century. Print the legend came out in 2002. It too swept up a batch of prizes and impressed readers with its central contention that contention that the conquest, settlement, and development of the American West could not be understood without reckoning with the Simultaneous Development of the history of photography. Marnie stalked this bold claim through all sorts of archives and through the big stories of the American West. No surprise, research on photography led her to work on the expeditions that mapped the western landscapes, and to the career of clarence king. Her accounts of kings life, passing strange a gilded age tale of love and deception across the color line, 2009, returns to the biographical art she learned when writing 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. And a race and the archives of project, theer webbased collaborative that she led on princeton and slavery. Maps, graphs, videos, 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. Let me end this intellectual wedding toast by turning to las vegass other industry and tell you one story about your president as a gambler. You wonder about this. I went to see marnie in santa fe. It worked again in santa fe come see me, she insisted, sure you one story about your [no audio] we invested 20 in quarters and, armed with our grubby plastic cups, spent the evening playing slots. We amused ourselves for a few hours, our dutiful souls taming the world of gambling and turning it into an evening outing. But if marnie took no risks at the casino floor, not so with her work, which teaches the surprises and opens eyes. I tell you, read her work and you will learn stuff. So let me give the podium to this member of my imagined cohort, my sleepy classmate, my generous colleague, and my brilliant friend, and let you listen to the next iteration of her marvelous weave of the visual, the verbal, of stories that play across history, from the intimate encounters to the imperial schemes. Raise a toast of whatever is on your table to her talk seeing 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 here. In fact, i probably did not much imagine still standing. But if intellectual curiosity brought me here in the first place, it is the friendships that have brought me back here. I want to say at the outset, thanks to all of you. Thank you all for making this such a continuing intellectual a welcoming and congenial intellectual home for me. It has been an honor to serve as your president. [applause] prof. Sandweiss now, the french historian once said there were two kinds of historians parachutists and truffle hunters. Sky, the flow in the letter snuffle in the dirt. 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, and ideas across vast stretches of space and time. You need to be a parachutist to see how old world germs or animals reshape the new world, but you can miss things from up there too. From up high, its hard to see the rhythms of daily life. From the space shuttle, you might spy a smoke plume from a volcano in iceland, but you would be hardpressed to understand the trouble of volcanic ash for people in rome, frantic about missing a wedding. Those very local what interestare truffle hunters. A truffle hunter might not see how atmospheric currents disperse volcanic ash above the italian peninsula, but she might learn something really interesting by eavesdropping on a conversation in the airport bar. Let me confess, i am afraid of heights. By temperament, i am a travel i am a truffle hunter. I am not asserting this as a superior historical practice. It simply what i like to do. With hindsight, i can see that this is the kind of historical practice to which my own peculiar career led me. When i began my career as a photography curator, i invariably had to start with the thing itself. And over and over again, i have learned that small objects photographs can lead to big stories. 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 their word, in petroglyphs and paintings with ceramic vessels and devotional art. But the settlement of the west as a part of the United States largely coincides with the invention and spread of photography. The new american mead american region and the new medium came of age together, and through photography, Many Americans encountered the west for the first time. Photographs still shaped our mental images of the west. Eye, we imagine California Gold miners, 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 can help us answer central questions about the western past. We have let writers and scholars from other disciplines shape the contemporary conversations about how to understand photographs. So, lets reclaim that turf. Lets ask from the perspective of our own field, how might historians think about and with photographs . 19th century observers were fast to see a connection between photography and history, and as the historical profession moved toward a new focus on the Scientific Method in the late 19th century, photographs seemed 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 historical aids that accidentally preserve the incidental details that might not have interested contemporary observers. Theoretically, he wrote in 1859, a perfect photograph is absolutely inexhaustible. And with a nod to the west, he argued that the accidents of life lent photographs an infinite charm. On the rawest western settlement and the oldest eastern city, in the myths of the shanties at pikes peak and stretching across the courtyards of damascus, wherever man lives with any of the decencies of civilization, you will find the clothesline. Later, in 1888, the local surgeon George Francis addressed the American 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, farms, and villages, 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 easiest, and the cheapest of all methods known at the present day. More than any other graphic process, he said, it was nearly free from error caused by the bias or prejudice of the operator. By 1902, franklin jamison, one of the president s of the Historical Association could put it this way we dwell in an age of prose. The world cares less for eloquence than it did a generation ago. Since darwin, it has been no more possible to produce a crop of mcauleys than for those who picture running horses to expel from their minds what they have learned from photographs about animal locomotion. To jamison, the precision of darwins observations and the photographs of galloping horses provided the evidence that historians needed for this new scientific history. And they were useful antidotes to what jamison called the imaginative presentations of human life that were documented in an 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 subjective observation of the world, not a purely objective one, that makes photographers and historians 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, about how to frame their subject in time and space, about what to highlight and what to exclude. Nonetheless, they stand in fundamentally different relationships to their subjects. Historians are always looking back. Photographers, of course, are always picturing a present, albeit an evanescent one that slips away the moment a sensitized film is exposed. So to consider the similarities and differences in how historians and photographers describe the world, lets focus on a photograph. For some time, i have been exploring the stories embedded in a photograph made at fort laramie in the dakota territory by Alexander Gardner. On either side of an identified of an identified girl stands six men, members of the Peace Commission to negotiate a treaty with various tribes on the northern plains. Gardner made the picture as part of a series that documents the work at the fort, as well as 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 up for a few more months. He knew the sounds of these peoples voices. He knew what the men ate for breakfast. He knew these people. But as a 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, into their uncertain futures. 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 museo, 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 13 years earlier, that resulted in the murder of sophies halfbrother. I can know that the raid indirectly 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 picture is being made, employing john b sanborn, standing 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 himself, if he can divert some of it to sophies father as compensation for his stolen horses. The point here is not to highlight my historical knowledge or to demonstrate that photographers and historians can have different needs for the same picture. I want to argue that historians have a fundamentally different relationship to time than photographers do. Both, of course, can observe temporal change as a part of the immediate experience, but historians look beyond the personal, and observing events across time is fundamental to their craft, to our craft. Historians can compress actions occurring across space and time, and with the benefit of hindsight, they can recover pivotal moments and causal links between discrete events. And looking back, they can reconsider people or events deemed uninteresting at the time, but valuable in retrospect. Remember holmess unnamed photographer . He might have inadvertently captured those 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 along the Laramie River with gardner and his subjects, i would surely learn something new and interesting about them all. Still, 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 familys future, as neither she nor gardner can, i can know her fathers lawsuits will remain unresolved when he dies 30 years later, and i can know that one of her sons will later press his grandfathers claims. Even in the digital era, it is hard to shake assumptions about the literalism of photography that first attracted historians to it as a new kind of historical document. Photographs seemed to offer an unmediated glimpse of the past. No matter how much we know about a photographers ability to manipulate the scene. But photographs are historical artifacts. 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 of the pictures, writing that many of them are beautiful pictures, but ill give the tales of indian grass and physiognomy that will be valuable for some time to come. When the daughter of a sketch artist connected to the Peace Commissioners described this photograph more than half a century after it was made, she spoke of it more metaphoric