Some Reflections on the "Visual Turn"

Paul Betts
Department of History, University of Sussex

In his 1766 treatise, _Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting
and Poetry_, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing advanced his celebrated
argument against Horace's _ut pictura poesis_ and the classical
world's untoward mixing of the verbal and the visual. For Lessing,
words and images were best studied separately, occupying in his mind
altogether different experiential registers and modes of
understanding. Many of today's readers will no doubt find such
polemics impossibly antiquated in an age of digitalization,
interdisciplinarity and the promiscuous blurring of the arts. Across
the humanities a whole generation of cultural studies scholars,
inspired by new work in art history, media studies and visual
anthropology, has taken aim at undermining the once formidable
distinction between word and image. In the last decade or so, younger
historians too have grown increasingly interested in exploring long
neglected visual sources and integrating them into their work. The
spate of recent publications on various aspects of what is now often
called "visual culture" has even prompted speculation that we are
witnessing a new "visual turn" in the field.

But upon closer inspection, the trend is far less prevalent than one
might think. Visual sources are still noticeably absent from larger
historical accounts of twentieth century Germany, or Europe for that
matter. If included at all, images are usually confined to a grabbag
"culture" chapter toward the back, or shoehorned into a "photo essay"
spliced in the middle of the text to illustrate the themes discussed
at length in prose. The leading history journals seldom publish
articles that engage with images, and those that do have appeared
only in the last few years at most. Even standard collections on
German Cultural Studies scarcely offer much in the way of visual
imagery or discussion of visual material, whereas the general volumes
expressly dedicated to "visual culture" hardly devote much attention
to Germany at all.[1] The 2006 collection, _Visual Culture in
Twentieth Century Germany_. edited by Gail Finney, is thus a welcome
addition to the literature. But even here the focus is mostly on
film, photography and painting, with some coverage of other visual
media like architecture, political iconography, advertising, posters,
dress, design and/or television. By now there is indeed a clutch of
recent books that take up these less conventional visual topics
extremely well, and in so doing have enriched the story of German
history considerably. But they are still relatively few, and what's
more, their findings are rarely imported into the broader narratives
of German history on offer. At this point, this may be par for the
course; after all, it took some time before social history, the
history of everyday life and the history of memory worked their way
into more mainstream studies. What is striking, though, is the extent
to which historians of Modern Germany in particular--despite the
massive amount of archived visual sources at their disposal--by and
large have been relatively uninterested in making use of them in
their work. Leora Auslander's assertion in a recent American
Historical Review article that "[h]istorians are, by profession,
suspicious of things" is no less true for images as well.[2]

Why is this so? Adequately answering this question would take me far
beyond the scope of this forum, but the pat response is usually to
say that it has something to do with the professionalization of
history as a discipline and its cherished "logocentrism" in making
sense of the past. Historiography on the subject has long maintained
that the late nineteenth century effort to distinguish the practice
of history from other disciplines and institutions--be it theology,
art history or the museum--necessitated a turning away from visual
sources toward close textual exegesis as the very basis of earnest
social science scholarship.  But this was not always the case. As
Bernd Roeck has recently argued, the flowering of cultural history as
a new field in the late nineteenth century--particularly in Germany--
did not preclude visual sources. On the contrary, many of the early
standards in the field--including Georg Hirth's
_Kulturgeschichtliches Bilderbuch aus drei Jahrhunderten_ (1881-97)
and Otto Henne am Rhyn's _Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Volkes_
(1897)--made good use of images in both the text and discussion to
chronicle the German cultural past.[3] While a number of more
visually-based cultural histories were published in the Weimar
Republic and in the Third Reich, taking on nasty virulence in various
Nazi era publications designed to "demonstrate" the supposed elective
affinities of culture and race, the use of imagery in mainstream
cultural histories markedly dropped off after 1945. But even if these
developments possessed a special history in Germany, the inherently
anti-visual bias of modern professional history-writing was
commonplace across Europe and North America. Indeed, the broader
trend of twentieth-century historiography across the Western world--
the Annales School and the oral history movement were important
exceptions--was an abiding suspicion toward incorporating non-textual
materials into academic history. Local and regional histories
(including their _Heimat_ variants) still featured plenty of visual
material in their chronicles, to be sure, but this found little echo
in most national-level histories, especially after 1945. The result
is a curious irony: the twentieth-century explosion of visual media
worldwide--forever altering the way most people see and understand
the world, each other and themselves--has exerted relatively little
impact on twentieth-century history-writing as a whole. Instead, the
interpretation of Germany's visual worlds--at least until very
recently--has been largely left to art historians, museum curators,
urban sociologists, media studies specialists and visual
anthropologists. Lessing's injunction to keep the study of word and
image separate has remained more dutifully observed among historians
than generally acknowledged.

Part of the resistance to using visual sources is seemingly the
thorny problem of what to do with images and image-making in
historical study. It may be some consolation that our uncertainty is
by no means new. In this regard, Frederic J. Schwartz's _Blind Spots:
Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth Century Germany_
(2005) is especially useful. In it he recalls the heady early
twentieth-century German debates about the meaning of visual images
for understanding the modern world, showing in this case how the
great Frankfurt School luminaries--above all, Theodor Adorno, Walter
Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Ernst Bloch--were intimately
acquainted with interwar debates in art history and aesthetics. Of
perhaps greater relevance was the way in which this generation of
thinkers took seriously the coming of the Visual Age, and placed
great store in investigating how new visual forms (optics, film and
commercial photography, for example) revealed the inner logic of
modernity itself. Not that this was easy or straightforward; as
Schwartz ably demonstrates, they--along with the great art historians
of the day such as Heinrich Woefflin, Alois Riegl and Wilhelm Pinder--
grappled continually with the question of what exactly images tell us
about any historical period. The relationship between image and
context, form and spirit, fragment and essence was something that all
of them in some form or other strove to ascertain. Today's historians
may bristle at this binary vocabulary, but the issue of how best to
relate particular to general--whether concerning textual or visual
sources--goes to the very quick of the historian's craft, and we can
learn a great deal from the way this interwar generation tried to
make sense of their own visual culture at the time. No less
interesting is the way that art historians returned to these
questions in the 1970s, devoting more energy toward studying
sociohistorical background to help situate aesthetic artifacts (the
definition of which underwent great expansion) in new and imaginative
ways. The founding of film studies in the early 1970s across Western
university campuses also did much to invigorate debates about how to
relate image to context.[4] It is a pity that at the moment when art
historians were reaching out to historians for inspiration and
dialogue, historians did little (and this goes for 1970s social
historians as well, who rarely dealt with images at all) to meet them
half-way, and are only now doing so.

What is to be learned by this? To be effective, the integration of
visual materials demands much more than "just add images and stir."
Anyone who has sat through dull powerpoint presentations painfully
knows that. A good deal of intellectual assembly is required if
images are to serve as more than simply the illustrative and
supplementary. Taking visual materials seriously (images and material
artifacts) does require sustained analysis about origins, intentions,
style, genre and audience. It is what we as historians are trained to
do already with myriad textual sources, and we should bring that same
spirit of scrutiny and layered interpretation to non-verbal materials
as well. Too often historians read images literally, presuming that
they somehow "speak for themselves." Just as texts are complex
creatures, so too are visual sources. Treating them as such would
yield real dividends, to the extent that a sharper sensitivity to
visual sources of all kinds can only enliven the practice of
historical inquiry by enlarging the very definition of artifact and
archive. After all, as Carolyn Steedman and others have argued, an
archive is not only a way of knowing, but also a way of seeing.

At its best the "visual turn" can go a long way in exploring aspects
of history that more conventionally-based textual histories ignore or
discount. There are many examples that one could discuss here, but I
will restrict myself to three. First, how power is disseminated
visually in the form of political pageantry, privileged dress,
spatial symbols and/or public performance is a growing area of
research for historians these days. About this we have much to learn
from our medievalist and early modernist colleagues, who have long
handled these questions with great flair and sophistication. Perhaps
it is no coincidence that the best primer introducing historians to
the use of visual materials is authored by a prominent early
modernist, Peter Burke, in his _Eyewitnessing: The Use of Images as
Historical Evidence_ (2001). What the book implies is that we need to
move beyond the old idea that growing literacy and the evolution of
bourgeois reading publics forever buried the ancien regimes and their
visual style of rule, or that a purely textually-based approach to
studying the past is the sole means of writing the story of
modernity. The bourgeois public sphere (to say nothing of the
bourgeois state) was--and is--image-driven as well, and what Walter
Benjamin famously dubbed the "aestheticization of politics" had a
tradition long before the advent of fascism. The well-documented
nineteenth century "invention of tradition" and co-optation of folk
history as national myth made this plain enough, even if the anti-
visual thrust of both Habermas's public sphere and Benedict
Anderson's "imagined communities" have obscured these developments.
All the same, the very notion of the nation as imagined and
culturally constructed has encouraged new research on how various
cultural practices--festivals, trade fairs, travel books, _Heimat_
postcards and stylized domestic interiors--played their part in
picturing and displaying the modern nation. James Scott's _Seeing
Like A State_ (1998) offers a promising line of thinking about these
issues, wedding as it does modern state formation and visual culture
in highly original ways. The point is that political life has always
been audiovisual, and the spread of mass media has fundamentally
remade our political communities over the course of twentieth
century. As historians we would do well to pay more heed to how
authority and community--secular or religious, national or regional--
have been created in both word and image.

If the "visual turn" can help us better understand power, the same
goes for the social construction of truth. An interesting example is
the history of atrocity photography. While war photography is usually
traced back to the American Civil War, the usage of atrocity
photography in war crimes trials came much later. Battlefield
photography was of course rife during the First World War, and there
were Entente lawyers who wanted to use incriminating photographs
against the Germans in the highly controversial war crimes tribunals
in Leipzig in 1921. But they were ultimately not used, in part
because all the belligerent powers had mass-produced atrocity images
as wartime propaganda, and thus using them might undermine the
delicate legitimacy of these newly established international
tribunals. But even if barred as trial evidence, atrocity images were
still used in the court of public opinion well into the 1930s. The
British were fed a steady diet of gruesome imagery from the Spanish
Civil War in daily newspapers (which prompted Virginia Woolf's _Three
Guineas_ [1938]--although she did refuse to reprint any of the
horrific images under discussion) and Goebbels was not shy in
publishing brutal photos from the Eastern front toward the end of the
war so as to drive home the point to the home front about the fate
awaiting them if they fell into Soviet hands. What was different was
the way that the Allies were keen to use atrocity imagery after this
war (usually in the form of graphic films of Holocaust horrors) as
part of their re-education campaign to make Germans face up to the
truth of the Third Reich, as recounted in Dagmar Barnouw's _Germany
1945_ (1995). It was during the Nuremberg Trials, as far as I know,
when atrocity photographs were first admitted as court evidence in
prosecuting war criminals. This is not merely an important marriage
of international law and visual culture, but tells us something about
the authority of visual images after 1945. (To what end was the whole
of the Nuremberg Trials filmed anyway?) But this is not to say that
such images remained ever-present. Recent scholarship has shown that
there was a marked disappearance of Holocaust imagery in German
public life from the end of the Nuremberg Trials to the controversial
publication of Gerhard Schoenberner's 1960 "picture book," _Der gelbe
Stern_. [5] To better understand the presence and absence of
Holocaust imagery (to say nothing of the invention of a small but
widely circulated canon of Holocaust images) in German public life is
a significant chapter of German "visual culture" in its own right.
And the whole issue of the relationship between visual imagery and
truth value has hardly lost its intensity, as noted a few years ago
with the explosive Wehrmacht exposition.

Another key area of visual culture is of course how people represent
themselves. A particularly rich vein in this regard is family photo
albums, a source oddly underused by historians. For if it is true
that the twentieth century was the century of the image, as it is
sometimes called, how ordinary people photographed (and later filmed)
themselves is hardly unimportant. Feminist historians and historians
of the family have long been employing such sources as part of their
effort to recover the lives of those "hidden from history." If
nothing else, they have helped us better grasp the relationship
between public and private in visual terms. In recent years, some
very suggestive work has been done on a related, if nettlesome,
topic: the relationship between private life and the nation. Annette
Kuhn's _Family Secrets_ (1995) and Strasbourg artist and writer Tomi
Ungerer's "visual memoir," _Tomi: A Childhood under the Nazis_ (1998)
are far-reaching accounts of how families (including children)
archive their link to national life. The Wehrmacht exposition of
private soldiers' photographs can certainly be seen in this regard as
well. How states and ordinary citizens commemorate the dead (ranging
from state funerals to gravestone design to family mementoes) are
just beginning to be explored as new historical topics. More
generally, the whole question of how selfhood, subjectivity and
"intimate pasts" (including the colonial experience) have been
visualized and/or communicated through imagery and material artifacts
deserves more careful consideration within the profession.

Doubtless skeptics will continue to dismiss this new wrinkle of
cultural history as just another passing fad whose results are better
suited to the coffee table than the academic bookshelf. Some of it
is, to be sure. But this doesn't blunt its promise and possibility.
There seems to me much to be gained by following Carl Schorske's lead
in his oft-cited _Thinking With History_ (1998), to the extent that
he takes seriously the memories and myths about the past that
inspired and informed nineteenth century urban planners,
intellectuals and literary elites. There is no reason why we can't do
more "thinking with images," approaching them as active elements of
historical importance, providing as they do meaning to and memories
about the flow of events. Continuing to explore the link between
image and memory is fundamental here, insomuch as it is difficult not
to analyze one without the other. Thinking with images is what we do
in the modern world, whether we are conscious of it or not.
Historians can choose whether and to what degree they take heed of
this. But it seems obvious enough that dismissing images and visual
artifacts as merely "reflections" of deeper causes best approached
through linguistic sources is a huge loss of potential knowledge.
Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini may be right in saying that the
"reason history interests us so passionately (and more than any other
science) is because the most important element in it irrevocably
eludes us," by which he meant the actual lived experience of the
past. Paying more attention to the whole range of non-literary
artifacts can only enrich and expand more imaginative historical
understanding. Recent books on music and radio have made a strong
case for their inclusion in mainstream German history, and we should
be no less open to works based on visual materials as well. Visual
culture studies are well-equipped to make a lasting contribution in
this respect, and if handled well should enjoy a bullish future both
within and beyond university life. Martin Jay's wry 1996 comment on
the fate of visual culture is no less apt now:  "Those who feel the
temptation to reach for their revolver when they hear the term
'visual culture' will discover as a result that it can only shoot
blanks. However imprecise and inadequate the anthropological concept
of visual culture may itself be, it is clearly here to stay."[8]

Notes:

[1]. Rob Burns, ed. _German Cultural Studies: An Introduction_ (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes
and Jonathan Petropoulos, eds. _A User's Guide to German Cultural
Studies_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Alison
Phipps, ed., _Contemporary German Cultural Studies_ (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002); and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed.
_Kulturgeschichte Heute_ (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht,
1996). For more general texts, see Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay,
eds., _Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on
Sight_ (London: Routledge Press, 1996) and Jessica Evans and Stuart
Hall, eds., _Visual Culture: The Reader_ (London: Sage, 1999).

[2]. Leora Auslander, "Beyond Words," _American Historical Review_
110 (October 2005): pp. 1015-1045.

[3]. Bernd Roeck, "Visual Turn? Kulturgeschichte und die Bilder,"
_Geschichte und Gesellschaft_ 29 (April/June 2002): pp. 294-315.

[4]. Angela Dalle Vacche, ed., _The Visual Turn: Classical Film
Theory and Art History_ ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2003).

[5]. Robert Sackett, "Visions of Atrocity: Public Discussion of Der
gelbe Stern in Early 1960s West Germany," _German History 24 (Winter
2006): pp. 526-561, forthcoming. See as well Habbo Knoch, _Die Tat
als Bild: Photographien des Holocaust in der deutschen
Erinnerungskultur_ (Hamburg: Hamburger edition, 2001).

[6]. Annette Kuhn, _Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination_
(London: Verso, 1995); and Hamburg Institute for Social Research,
ed., _The Germany Army and Genocide_ (New York: New Press, 1996) and
Tomi Ungerer, _A Childhood under the Nazis_ (Boulder: Tomico, 1998).
Interesting too is Birgit Jochens, _Deutsche Weihnacht: Ein
Familienalbum, 1900-1945_ (Berlin: Nicolai, 1996).

[7]. Carl Schorske, _Thinking With History: Explorations in the
Passage to Modernism_ (Princeton,: Princeton University Press, 1998).

[8]. Martin Jay, "Visual Culture Questionnaire," _October_ 77 (Summer
1996): pp. 42-44; quotation p. 44.

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