Practice question · Select all that apply
What questions should a historian put to a photograph?
Hints
- The questions concern the photographer, the frame and the selection.
- The most powerful distortions require no manipulation at all.
Show the answer
- A. Who held the camera, and why were they there?
- B. Which frame of the roll was selected for publication, and by whom?
- C. Does the image appear technically manipulated?
- D. What is just outside the frame?
Why
All four, though the last is the least useful, since the powerful distortions require no manipulation at all. A photograph is testimony from a witness with a position, not a fact.
Practise Visual and Iconographic Sources
The app has 6 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Visual and Iconographic Sources
- A 1900 photograph shows a family posed stiffly outside their cottage. What is the most defensible thing the…
- Early war photography is reliably candid, because the technology made staging impractical.
- Why is a painting’s background often its most reliable evidence?
- Roughly how much larger is Africa than Greenland, despite Mercator showing them at similar size?
- No projection preserves both area and shape, and no neutral map of the Earth exists. Why is that a…