Note: This post ran as a Presidential Column in the Spring 2022 issue of the Mining History News.

After reading the last newsletter, MHA member Hans Muessig wrote me with a suggestion for this column. “Historic photographs are a critical and I think underutilized resource in studying the past,” he argued, and I couldn’t agree more!

Historians are generally trained to pay closest attention to words and texts as sources, a preference that dates to the earliest years of the field’s professionalization in the 19th century. But what, then, about photographs as sources of historical information? Put simply, they can show us, rather than tell us, what a place looked like at some moment in the past. We can see buildings that are no longer standing, view technologies soon to be replaced, and note the location of streets, sidewalks, ore piles, and more. All valuable, or potentially so! But more can be understood from photographs if you look a little deeper.

This topic is near and dear to me. My doctoral dissertation and first book were both concerned with the visual culture of mining, and when the book project turned to examine maps and models in greater detail, I summarized the part of my research focused on underground photography in an article for the Mining History Journal in 2010.¹ Of course, most photography associated with mining was not carried on underground, so far more might be said about photography and mining history.

I mentioned a moment ago that most historians are not trained specifically to work with photographs as sources, which meant that I was lucky indeed to be mentored in the study of historic photographs by Peter Liebhold, Curator (now Emeritus) of the Division of Work and Industry at the National Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian Institution. Peter was responsible for the mining collections in the museum, among many others, but he was formally trained in photography, and he generously shared this knowledge with an eager graduate student.

Just as it is helpful to historians to know the context in which a document they are analyzing was created, it is very useful to know a little bit about the history of photography in order to better use and understand photographs as sources. Whole books exist on the history of photography, of course, so I’ll just mention two of the many things that Peter taught me, long ago, to look for when encountering a historic photograph – the conventions, and the photographic technology.

Photography is filled with conventions, and those conventions also change over time. Understanding the conventions that the photographer was trying to invoke can help a historian recover more information about what is being portrayed, and better understand what the photograph might and might not be attempting to say.

Think of the photographic conventions of our present day – so commonplace that we might not give them much thought at all. There’s the “selfie” pose, for instance, which has come to imply a kind of fun and casual spontaneity. The selfie didn’t exist before the last decade or two, dependent to some degree on changes in camera technology to make them light enough to hold in an outstretched arm and have lenses that can capture objects very close. (Helpfully, these two technological innovations are packaged together in a tiny computer that fits in our pocket.) The selfie can be used as a convention even when there are other photographic conventions that might also be available. Imagine a small group at one of our annual meetings wants a photograph – do we gather up and hand a camera to a friend who tells us to say “cheese”? Or do we huddle, put on an exaggerated facial expression, and take a group selfie? Our choice of conventions, in that moment, might have something to do with where we think the photo will go (on the MHA website? Facebook?), and how close members of the group are as friends in addition to mining history colleagues. Maybe the efforts of the reception bartender have an effect too!

In the 19th century, photographic conventions were even stronger influences on how photographs were made. Many photographers of the time had some training as artists, and so they would commonly incorporate artistic conventions when staging their photographs. Photographs of workers often included their tools or uniforms, for instance. For outside photographs, such as of mining sites, photographers would try to incorporate a tiny human element. We think of this as being “for scale,” which it was to an extent, but it was also an invocation of a small human pondering a large, sublime creation – one tradition among many that photographers derived from romantic landscape artists. If you look carefully, those tiny humans are usually looking at the “real” subject of the photo, such as the headframe, vast and sublime, rather than at the photographer directly. Photographers of this time would also sometimes deliberately leave some trace of themselves in the work, like an artist’s signature on a painting. These can include their portable developing kit or wagon, a shadow of the tripod and hooded photographer, or (my favorite) a faint reflection of camera and cameraman in a window or mirror.

Liebhold also emphasized that a little knowledge of the technology of photography could be extremely helpful in reading a photograph. Any photograph had to journey through three stages – exposure, where light (and, of course, an image) fell on some kind of sensitive base; development, where that exposed base was “fixed” to prevent the image from disappearing; and printing, where a permanent copy was made. Recognizing the underlying technology used, whether daguerrotype, wet collodion plate, dry plate, or roll film, could help date the photo or print and provide clues about how to interpret some of the features on the image. Working with negatives and prints in the museum’s collection, Peter showed me how wet plate negatives could be distinguished from dry plates, such as by the uneven borders of the image (where the emulsion was blocked from the edge where the photographer had to handle it), and the non- uniform coating on the negative itself. We saw how photographers could alter negatives after exposure but before printing, to write on them (backwards!), or to draw or erase elements with india ink, which printed white in the final image.

He helped me realize that it is wise to assume that there was no such thing as a casual photograph before about 1890, and for several decades more, professional photographs were carefully composed by people familiar with artistic conventions and who were using cameras that required careful setup and composition of the image to be captured. The ultimate image depended on their equipment, their technique, and a range of factors that might or might not be within their control, but they might take measures to get a good shot that would seem over-the- top to us today. The image of a historic mining town seems to show a pleasant, early spring day when there are no leaves on trees to block detail, it’s light enough to show the buildings evenly without terrible shadows, yet cold enough that chimney smoke and heat creates a field of industrious little plumes? Not a coincidence. The photographer probably waited very carefully to capture that particular shot in that particular way.

By the way, if you can see the negatives, you might be in for a real treat. Glass plate technology captured much finer detail than film did. Put in modern terms, these glass negatives represent images of a hundred megapixels or more, and the glass plates are usually huge compared to the smaller film negatives with which we are familiar from later times. With a modern scanner using a backlight (to push light through the negative), sometimes remarkable detail can be extracted from the negative that was not visible in the print.

But the best piece of advice I received from Peter was to think of photographs as representing not just the facts of a past time and place, but also some point of view. Literally! A photograph is taken from a point of view, which is an optical point in space but which also exists as a function of the intents of the photograph’s creator, including photographic or artistic conventions they choose to use, combined with the constraints placed on them by technology and their subject. In turn, when you use a photograph in the course of working on mining history, I encourage you to do more than just using it as an illustration. Help your audience understand the evidence you derive from this unique and valuable source!

Eric Nystrom, MHA President

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