The School album: images, insights and inequalities = L'àlbum de l'escola: imatges, introspecció i desigualtats

Abstract

Photographs, as Elizabeth Edwards noted in her essay on the photography of Susan Meiselas, are «cultural objects», made to «project certain meanings and elicit certain affects». Traditionally, historians, when they have worked with photographs, have been generally concerned with extracting evidence about the materiality of the past. This is done by looking at what is made present in an image. However, the meaning[s] we take from photographs are always framed by the context in which we come upon them and looking always has a subjective quality which shapes the ideas that are formed in dialogue with an image and the meanings that are then constructed. Using a 1920s school photographic album of Floodgate Street Infant School from 1920s Birmingham, England this small essay will explore the nature of images, their hidden meanings and the importance of contextualizing the visual. This exploration of the visual is grouped around four different categories of context the archive as a site of memory; the knowing gaze; the technology of display; and the singularity of the image. The essay also considers the idea of the «social biography» of an image and how digitization can transform original images and their meaning.