A motionless dialect? Historians and photography between linguistic turn and visual studies

di Luigi Tomassini
in Memoria e Ricerca n.s. 40 (2012), p. 93

How the visual studies have influenced the work of historians? To answer this question the paper addresses some methodological problems that have characterized the historians’ growing attention for images over the last decades. Particularly, we examine the photograph as an image that is simultaneously trace and representation of the reality. The second part offers a survey of the works that have used photography as a historical source in Italy, identifying the Italian specificity in a strong presence of historical-political essays using the photographic sources. Key words: Visual Studies, Cultural History, History Theory and Method, History of Photography, Historians, Italy