Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Its history would be absent of images that defined historical moments and generations. Today such a history feels insubstantial and imprecise, even unscientific. And yet photographic technology was not always a necessary precondition for the accurate documentation of history. The documentary impulse that emerged in the late nineteenth century combined the power of science and industry with a particularly utopian (and often imperialistic) belief in the capacity of photography and film to capture the world visually, order it, and render it useful for future generations. This book is about the material and social life of photographs and films made in the scientific quest to document the world. It explores their creation and production as well as the collecting practices of librarians, archivists, and corporations. Together, the chapters of Documenting the World call into question the canonical qualities of the authored, the singular, and the valuable image, and transgress the divides separating the still photograph and the moving image, as well as the analogue and the digital. They also definitively overturn the traditional role of photographs and films in historical studies as passive illustrations.
Industry Reviews
"Documenting the World posits the fascinating impulse for documentation that emerged in the late nineteenth century as a desire to visualize, order, and preserve the world. Photographic and filmic documentation, as Mitman and Wilder conceive of it, is an active process that transforms subjects, relationships, environments, and disciplines. The first book to explore the documentary impulse in photographic media from a cross-disciplinary perspective and with theoretical sophistication, Documenting the World brings together scholars from social history, anthropology, art history, and science studies."-- "Tanya Sheehan, Colby College"
"Providing nine distinct perspectives on the roles of still and moving photographic
images in the construction of documents and evidence, the volume gathers established and emerging researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. Each chapter illuminates different manifestations of 'the documentary impulse' in the form of photographs and footage, of course, but also through a wealth of elements supporting the status of a given film or photograph as document - including, but not limited to, picture frames, colour filters, captions and mounts, expedition reports, narratives, shelving systems, catalogue entries, online search engines, and metadata. . . . As the introduction makes clear, the project has been executed in collaboration among all contributors, and when reading the volume from cover to cover (which is an unusual way of reading an essay collection, but one I deeply recommend in this instance) the contributions by Edwards and Mitman work particularly well to weave the different strands of the project together in the middle, as it were."-- "History of Photography"
"This is an innovative and exciting collection of essays. The contributors' perceptive treatment of three key themes--the documentary image as evidence, the circulation and recirculation of images, and the histories and meanings of image archives--provides original insights into the documentary impulse and its cultural and material significance. Documenting the World presents cutting-edge research that will advance history of photography and film scholarship in novel and significant ways for years to come."-- "Finis Dunaway, author of Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images"
"Too little attention is paid to what we gain when we pay attention to the history of photography and documentary film. Happily, editors Mitman and Wilder show us how still and moving images can significantly deepen our grasp of the evolution of scientific work; they have gathered together here an impressive group of distinguished scholars across the fields of science and visualization. We have needed a book like Documenting the World for many years--I have no doubt that it will prove to be an important addition to existing scholarship."-- "Peter Galison, Harvard University"
