Matthew Frye Jacobson - The Historians Eye

Photography, History, and the American Present

University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill,

This book was published with the assistance of the
William R. Kenan Jr. Fund of the University of North
Carolina Press.

2019 Matthew Frye Jacobson

All rights reserved

Designed by Kimberly Bryant and set in
Whitman and DIN types by Tseng Information
Systems, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a
member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Jacket illustrations: collage of photographs
by Matthew Frye Jacobson; Isolated Shot of
Professional Camera Lens against Black Background,
iStockphoto.com/kyoshino.

DOCUMENTARY ARTS AND CULTURE
Edited by Alexa Dilworth, Wesley Hogan, and
Tom Rankin of the Center for Documentary
Studies at Duke University

In a time when the tools of the documentary
arts have become widely accessible, this series of
books, published in association with the Center
for Documentary Studies at Duke University,
explores and develops the practice of documentary
expression. Drawing on the perspectives of
artists and writers, this series offers new and
important ways to think about learning and doing
documentary work while also examining the
traditions and practice of documentary art through
time.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 1958 author,
photographer. | Duke University. Center for
Documentary Studies, publisher.
Title: The historians eye : photography, history, and
the American present / Matthew Frye Jacobson.
Other titles: Documentary arts and culture.
Description: Chapel Hill : University of North
Carolina Press ; [Durham] : in association with
the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke
University, [2019] | Series: Documentary arts and
culture | Includes bibliographical references and
index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018049444 |
ISBN 9781469649665 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781469649672 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: United StatesHistory21st
centuryPictorial works. | United States
History21st century. | Documentary
photographyUnited States. | Street
photographyUnited States. | Obama, Barack. |
LCGFT: Illustrated works.
Classification: LCC E907 .J33 2019 |
DDC 973.9320022/2dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049444

To Daphne

Meditation (noun):
a discourse intended to express
its authors reflections or to guide
others in contemplation.

THE HISTORIANS EYE

American culture tends not to cultivate or place much value on serious historical reflection. Every now and then, we share a collective reverie along the lines of Errol Morriss Fog of War or Ava DuVernays epic civil rights film, Selma; but as a nation our historical attentions more often run in the registers of Gone with the Wind, Davy Crockett, Hogans Heroes, The Godfather, Jersey Boys, or Django Unchainednot exactly sustained reflection of the sort that enhances historical understanding or roots the present meaningfully in the soil of the past. We have developed a mild taste for history as adventure, as romance, as tragedy, as nostalgia, as escapism, as farce, even as nonsense. But history as an instrument for analyzing the contours and meaning of present conditions, not really, not even in the context of policy debates or political oratory. The culture has a woefully short memory to begin with; but as the basic unit of public discourse has contractedfirst to the tiny morsel of the television sound bite, later codified by Twitter at one hundred forty charactersmeaningful historical reflection has become an extravagance, and the nation goes careening ever onward.

Which is why the historian in me was so captivated during that first season of Obama, as it were, between the Democratic primaries of spring 2008 and the inauguration in early 2009. Street-level conversation quickly and pointedly fixed on this historic event or this historical moment, and I heard people all around mestudents, colleagues, delivery people, waitresses, barbers, garage attendantsactively placing themselves in the timelines of history in phrases like I never thought this could happen in my lifetime, or were making history, marveling aloud that this had not seemed possible in America at all, not thirty years ago, not twenty, not one year ago.

Even the horrors of 9/11 had failed to elicit this widely shared tendency among Americans to suddenly see themselves in history. The terrorist attacks may have bifurcated history into a before and an after for many; there was a lot of talk about how the world has been changed forever. But this was a fundamentally ahistorical conversation underneath it all, in that it rarely demonstrated a true engagement with the details, movements, trajectories, or tendencies of postwar history. In my experience (I was living in Manhattan at the time), most people commented on how the world had been changed forever without indicating any idea of a relevant past. For most, the event came out of nowhere. This is hardly a historians careful formulation. Nine/eleven might prove a cause of whatever was to come next, but it absolutely defied definition as a consequence of anything that had come before, in popular understanding. The Islamophobic slogan Everything I need to know about Islam I learned on 9/11 tacitly implied the twinned assertion Everything I need to know about 9/11 I can locate in Islam. The thinking after that tragedy was addled, perhaps understandably so. But it represented above all a widely held and massive ahistoricism, whatever else you want to say about this dreadful collective experience.

But the Obama election was different. People I talked to now saw themselves in history; they actively took measure of the distance back to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts; they paced off and recharted the topography of the postcivil rights decades. Underneath the river, the riverbed is moving, artist and photographer Renee Athay said. People now plumbed those rushing historical waters, trying to comprehend whatever subterranean motion it had been that delivered up a Barack Obama after decades that had seemed so stagnant on questions of race and social justice. From Nixons southern strategy to Ronald Reagans cynical visit to Philadelphia, Mississippi; to the assault on affirmative action; to the rise of the carceral state; to the Rodney King beating and other racialized police violence; to continued and worsening suppression of the black vote; tothe election of Barack Obama? The smiles and the awed clicks of the tongue, Never thought Id see this day, represented a vernacular American meditation on the movements of history unlike any I had heard before. On another track, people in coffee shops or at the local bar were also measuring the economic crisis against the Great Depression and calling for the return of FDR.

Paula Rabinowitz has defined the status, meaning, interpretation, and perhaps even control of history and its narratives as what is at stake in most progressive documentary work. The stakes in this particular project were somewhat differentto coax some workable historical thinking as a start; not so much to wrest control of a narrative, but to help in breaking silence and in generating some narratives to work with.