My current research looks at image archives, those of the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, as well as the more recently established Vidéothèque de Paris, asking how photography became the modern form of urban documentation and a key tool for teaching history to a public accustomed to learning through images.[1] But while photography transformed urban documentation and interpretation as practiced at municipal institutions and by popular and amateur urban historians, we as professional historians (and not just of cities or of France) have sometimes been impervious to its transformations. My contribution shares some of the images I’ve found in archives and illustrated books order to make three points that argue for the necessarily visual aspects of any urban history.

Historians need to consider images, first, because they – and in particular photographs – do not simply record or represent urban transformations or experiences. The history of producing and consuming pictures is the history of urban experience since the nineteenth century. When photographer Charles Lansiaux documented wartime Paris in 1914 for the Bibliothèque historique’s archives, he took photos of young men joining up, refugees arriving at the Gare du Nord, and the destruction waged by nationalist Parisians on “foreign-owned” shops and restaurants. But he also took photos that document the urban demand for and consumption of photographs. One such photo shows the vitrines of the Lumière et Jougla photo headquarters on the rue de Rivoli. Lansiaux’s caption explains that the establishment is “bien connue de tout Paris pour ses actualités photographiques, en temps ordinaire la foule est très compacte à ses vitrines.” One immediately then notices the absence of this crowd. A handful of pedestrians pass in front of the shop, but only one is peering in the windows. Crowds gathered around photographic studios had to have been stereotypical features of urban centers for Lansiaux to deem their absence worthy of note. Photographs taken during the Liberation of Paris show that almost forty years later, even Nazi soldiers avidly participated in the culture of photographing and painting the city. Indeed, certain sites, such as the Place du Tertre in Montmartre have become inextricably linked with the production of city views. The image-maker, the professional or amateur photographer, has become just as much a staple of Parisian street life as the urban types he or she captures. And images themselves serve as compelling evidence of the social and material history of picture taking and making in urban centers, a history, needless to say, that long predates the iPhone.

Secondly, as historians, when we use images in our own work – and whether we intend to or not – we are making theoretical arguments about the relationship between the past, the image, and historical analysis. Just to give you one example, historians of cities often take their own photographs of the buildings, monuments, or streets they write about – even when they discuss these objects and places as they were years, decades or centuries earlier. Photos by the author, of course, are rights free, which is an obvious advantage. However, this practice carries the theoretical argument that the physical remains of the city document previous periods better even than an image from the period in question might. The use of such photographs implies a belief in the historical continuity of physical space such that a 2013 photograph of a building would tell us about the building in 1956. These photos unintentionally brush over the mutability of social space even as historians make arguments about the role of architecture and urban planning in shaping people’s lives.

Lastly – and this point also addresses the relationship between illustration and argument – visual sources can help us access information that textual sources may not have preserved. Street photography, in particular, can give us infinite information on the relationships between city dwellers as they played out in the streets – from the gaping of the crowd around street performers to how people actually dressed and wore their hair. Photography is invaluable for the history of advertising – or indeed for the history of architecture, for since Paris has been overrun with sandblasters and power washers in the last decades, its buildings look very different from the middle of the century. If one looks at the 100,000 photographs from the amateur photo contest “C’était Paris en 1970,” held in May 1970, one finds not only evidence of innumerable details of everyday life – including the omnipresence of a certain Levis ad that May – but also how thousands of amateur photographers saw their city and its changing face. These photographs provide a chorus of opinions about contemporary urbanization, seen not by experts or politicians, but by average people. By approaching their photographs not as confirmation or denial of these other discourses, I’ve been able to make a different argument about the reception of urbanization in 1970, in a way no other archive would have. This example suggests that the masses of photographs produced of cities since the nineteenth century – provided they exist in archives and collections accessible to historians – may have many more patterns and stories to tell if we approach them as sources not just illustrations.

Before I end, I’d like to clarify two points. One, I do not mean to turn illustration into a dirty word. Illustrations are essential to our work as historians whether they help us show information or communicate a sense of local color to our audiences. We should use pictures in our scholarship and teaching, but we should just be clear about why and how we are using them. And we should make sure that in hunting these images, we do not shut down the other possibilities that visual sources offer us. Two, when I talk about using images as sources, I do not imply that we must separate them from their texts or contexts. All the data that comes with photographs – captions, their placement in a book or magazine, their organization within an archive – helps us read these sources.

To conclude, I’d like to come back to a question that Ellen asked in the proposal for this roundtable: is there such a thing as “French” urban history? Of course one could answer by evoking certain structures (as Jeff just showed us) or individuals (Haussmann springs to mind), but I wonder if we could eek out another definition of French urban history. I think it’s safe to say – at least to an audience of French historians – that as a field, we have been more open to theoretical and methodological innovations, often adopting these before peers in other fields. I think it’s possible that this openness to difficult methodologies and theoretical puzzles might, moving forward, help define a French urban history. Part of our willingness to innovate in the face of methodological problems should involve – especially as we work more on the twentieth century and eventually the twenty-first century – paying attention to the wealth of possibilities of the visual for urban historical analysis. I’m not proposing that everyone work on studies that place the visual front and center nor that every project become a digital history project. Rather I propose that an attention to what illustrations are doing in our work, an openness to the idea that pictures are not just representations but traces of social and material actions, and a willingness to come to images with questions, but no ready arguments to apply to them, might help us account for the obvious visual components of the urban past.

Notes:

    1. For more see: Catherine E. Clark, “‘C’était Paris en 1970’: Histoire visuelle, photographie amateur et urbanisme,” trans. Jean-François Allain, Études photographiques, no. 31 (Spring 2014): 86–113; Catherine E. Clark, “La Vidéothèque de Paris: Memory of the Future,” Contemporary French Civilization 40, no. 1 (2015): 1–23.return to text