Photographs as Sources for the History of Experience: Experiencing with and Through Photography

Abstract

This chapter discusses photography as a site of historical experience. It asks whose experiences photographs can convey and how they do so in different historical situations. It explores different ways how photographs can be examined as social and material documents when analysing historical experience. Through the lens of the history of experience, photographs can reveal intimate and private experiences, just like written ego-documents; the mechanisms by which experiences become shared and collective; spatially and materially bound experiences; and the framing of experiences in institutional and societal contexts. Photography can be seen as a means of marking, producing, and re-experiencing meaningful experiences, operating between different temporalities and interacting with memory. Photographs open up avenues for discussing experiential frictions, as well as silences and absences.