In an album that traveled from Taiwan to the United States years ago, a small, square, black-and-white photograph resides on a well-worn page. Taken on a sunny day in the late 1950s, the image frames a family outside their modest home in the city of Chiayi: a policeman and homemaker with six young sons and daughters, wearing their best clothes and looking into the lens with stoic, yet relaxed expressions. This was my father’s family. My dad, then an elementary school student, remembers a twinlens-reflex camera on a spindly tripod, its spring-driven self-timer buzzing as it counted down the seconds to exposure. In the moment before the shutter tripped, his youngest sister—a toddler seated on a wooden stool to raise her to everyone else’s height— turned to peek at her parents beside her, perhaps wondering what everyone was looking at. In the photo, she is the only member of the family to break their gaze with the camera.
What resulted was one of the few images of my father and his immediate family in their youth. It is the photograph that sparked my interest in history.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, we have lived in a world populated by photographs. From the private to the institutional, the mundane to the iconic, photographic images and technologies have profoundly shaped ways we see ourselves and others across time. Many are likely in a digital device near you now, joining billions of other images around the world that saturate presentday experiences. Yet, as famed American photographer Ansel Adams complained: “a photograph is usually looked at—seldom looked into.” This rings true for casual image-making today, with most photos remaining forever in private, digital form. After all, how historical is that selfie or a snapshot of a store receipt, cast into smartphone or cloud storage with everything else from random occurrences to major life events?
Images are all around us, with technologies that have placed photography in nearly everyone’s hands. Yet, we tend to see through them. Even professional historians still gravitate toward texts as primary sources. For many, photos are secondary illustrations at best and afterthoughts at worst.
When looking into photographs and their historical existences, however—personal and collective, micro and macro—there is more than meets the eye. I spoke with four members of the U-M community for whom the intersections of photography and history hold volumes.
The office of Nikki Gastineau, History’s chief administrator, is graced by a framed black-and-white photograph of the Eiffel Tower at night, dramatically lit by searchlights. As artistic as it is, the image is no mere decorative piece. The photograph, made around the conclusion of World War II in Europe, was kept by Gastineau’s paternal greatuncle, James Gastineau, then a technician with the US Army’s 225th Antiaircraft Searchlight Battalion. His unit was among the first to land in France following D-Day in June 1944. Less than a year later, in the spring of 1945, its searchlights illuminated bridges and nighttime landing points as Allied forces rolled across the Rhine River to defeat Nazi Germany.
As the war came to an end, Gastineau and his comrades occupied a destroyed German airfield. Surrounded by abandoned Luftwaffe aircraft and bomb craters, they discovered a building with a working darkroom. They immediately began developing film from their cameras, printing on stocks of Agfa-branded photo paper left behind by retreating German troops. Some of the images were leisurely, with US soldiers touring postwar Bavaria and taking in scenic views of the Alps. Others displayed a youthful Americanness flush with victory over fascism. One of Gastineau’s photographs captured soldiers playing a pick-up game of baseball in the wide expanse of Nuremberg’s now-deserted Zeppelinfeld Nazi rally grounds.
Still others held horrifying traces of the Holocaust. A tiny print kept by Gastineau depicted emaciated concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation, wearing the tattered remains of their striped uniforms. And then there was the photograph of the Eiffel Tower, lit by the unit’s searchlights (“for display purposes” as the battalion’s official history put it), a triumphant symbol of the war’s end seen through an American infantryman’s lens. Yet, for all that these photographs speak to the histories of World War II, its photographer was known by his family in another life, far from the conflict he and his camera witnessed.
“He always seemed like a gentle giant to me,” Nikki Gastineau says of her great-uncle, “he was big, but he was always smiling.” James and his wife Lyda had no children of their own, but they showered affection on others in their family. In a parallel way, his WWII photographs were a mode of connecting himself to loved ones far away in the US, receiving his letters and prints in the mail while awaiting his return from Europe. Upon that return, however, photographs and memories alike were quietly put away to avoid resurfacing the traumas involved. As Gastineau noted, “the photographs made me realize maybe why he wouldn’t talk about his war experience … some people in my generation are like, ‘just tell me stories,’ but these old guys, they don’t want to tell stories.”
James Gastineau’s photographs now reside with Nikki Gastineau alongside another collection of photographs created by her maternal great-aunt, Elizabeth Parson. Parson, who suffered from scoliosis and asthma—conditions that ultimately led to her death—used photography as her way of participating in family life. Like the wartime photos, these images represent a voice in the background: present and yet seen at a distance.
Found by Gastineau while cleaning out the home of her maternal grandfather (Parson’s brother) on a hot summer’s day in Kentucky, Parson’s photographs were very nearly lost. They had been stashed away in an old roasting pan, forgotten and unseen for years. Upon discovery, Gastineau’s grandfather “couldn’t imagine that I would have any interest in them,” Gastineau says with a laugh, “he was like, ‘oh, you can just throw those away!’”
Gastineau did not. The on-the-spot decision to keep her greataunt’s photos preserved an entire set of personal perspectives, allowing her “to see a woman I had never met, who died when my mom was young, and to form a relationship with her.”
Parson’s photographs, covering her life from the 1930s through the 1960s, represent the views of a single woman in the Appalachian foothills, struggling with debilitating illnesses while visually documenting her family. Linked to diaries that Parson kept, the photographs bear out regional travels and gatherings, depictions of an individual moving and seeing through time. They mapped the rural environs of Lancaster, Kentucky, where Parson grew up as the daughter of a sharecropper, as well as her interactions with the land and local community. Her snapshots wove together visual narratives of place and personhood that only ended when she was no longer physically able to continue photography. For someone that Gastineau recalled as having a frail, even ghostlike existence, such images brought Parson’s life into focus, and her visions to life.
The complexities of seeing a loved one’s experiences through photographs is shared by jessie neal, a U-M PhD student in American Culture. We met recently at a coffee shop near the Diag, and within minutes, neal was excitedly passing their phone to me across the table. On the screen were scores of black-andwhite photographs from the 1940s and 1950s they had digitized in their work, many of which depicted female friends engaged in outings and school performances. Part of neal’s research on indigenous gendered identities of CHmarou women in twentieth century Guam, these images came from high school yearbooks created and kept by their maternal grandmother, Teresita Ignacio Santos Currie. Santos Currie, who lived through the Japanese military occupation of the island in World War II, later continued her studies at U-M, beginning a connection with the university that has come full-circle in her granddaughter’s research.
As neal pored over yearbook photographs annotated by their grandmother’s classmates at their all-girl Catholic school— captions sometimes containing terms coded with queer intimacy—they were able to visualize CHmarou identity formation beyond written words alone. The images traced self-presentations by Santos Currie and her friends in fashions, hairstyles, and activities— gendered forms of personal control over imperial power that intersected with, and sometimes violently disrupted, their lives. Reading these private and semiprivate photographs allowed neal to “gain deeper access into my nana’s world.” The images subverted understandings of female personhood and indigeneity that were otherwise largely absent in global, territorial, and even local histories of Guam. They deepened neal’s understanding of an all-girl indigenous community wrestling with forces that disadvantaged them by virtue of their sexuality. Taking this all in, neal notes, “big history moments can erase microhistorical experiences, from relationships to responses to violence.”
By creating a visual record of her own and her community in Guam, the photographs collected by Santos Currie became a way of asserting gendered CHmarou life. neal found that people they found in the archive were “revived through images and memory.” This revival extends to neal’s oral history collection with their grandmother, who now lives in Texas. Santos Currie often found it “more comfortable to see herself [in photographs] compared to reading.” In neal’s ongoing research, recollections of the past often surface when an image is present to spark them.
Clayton Lewis agrees. Lewis, curator emeritus of Graphic Materials at the U-M William L. Clements Library, calls photography “the most socially dynamic media.” “From day one, people reacted to photos, shared photos, and took photos of themselves in ways that were different from painted portraits or any other visual media,” he says, and he knows it well. In his twenty years at the Clements, Lewis preserved hundreds of thousands of rare, historic photographs from major donors, presented numerous lectures and classes on visual material, and organized symposia on visual culture.
The breadth of scholarly engagement that Lewis developed is matched by the power that he sees in every photograph—as cultural artifacts with multiple natures. He invites students and researchers to imagine “seeing a photograph for the first time and how different that impact would have been,” as well as to explore diverse intentions behind photographs made by different individuals, for example, “a wartime artist who was being paid by the government to photograph, or a journalist being paid by a newspaper, or a soldier that happened to have a camera in their pocket.”
Lewis found that the joys and challenges of working with photographs requires real sensitivity to their subjects’ existences; this is particularly important when imagemaking is fraught with uneven power dynamics. In putting together the Richard Pohrt, Jr. Collection of Native American Photography at the Clements, Lewis and his colleagues worked closely with U-M faculty and tribal representatives around the state, ensuring that as many perspectives, even conflicting ones, were collected on the existences of photographs’ makers, subjects, and audiences. One of the best pieces of advice that the curatorial group received, Lewis says, “was not to presume to speak for the people in the photos, and also not to presume that they didn’t have agency.” The multiple perspectives that coexisted in photography surrounding Native communities—between the dignity of self-representation or resistance and the violence of oppression—are strands of simultaneous existences.
In undertaking her research, “I became very conscious,” Moore explained, “about how photographers were seeing the world at the time; these visual sources were immediate and of their moments.” She recounts lively exchanges between photographers and their subjects on the streets of New York that revealed image making as forms of conversation: between individuals as they set up portraits or between members of the Photo League in darkrooms and creative gatherings. The exchange of ideas accompanied the creation of images, and the creation of images shaped communal identities.
Visions and visuality, of course, change over time. Everyone with whom I spoke agreed that images of the future—and ideas about them—are now in question.
Moore believes that the loss of traditional photographic techniques—requiring technical knowledge, waiting for an image to be seen, and selection processes with physical visual products—changed everything. jessie neal alluded to the impact of AI, noting that in the future, “it’s going to be hard to decide what an image is.” Gastineau laments that despite the ease of sharing digital photos or scans of existing prints, “we don’t spend enough time telling stories about photos.” Clayton Lewis, whose first camera was a 1930s Rolleicord twin-lens-reflex that the New York subjects of Moore’s book would have recognized, notes that “images are now being made for us, but not by us.” He predicts that future audiences will likely be far more distrustful of digital images, but is hopeful that analog imaging will persist. After all, Lewis notes, “the materiality [of printed photographs] comes with a mysterious power, an aura that communicates differently.”
My daughter—now the same age as her own grandfather when he and his family sat for their historic portrait in Taiwan— recently inherited a digital camera my wife used in college. As the child of a historian of visual culture, growing up in a house filled with vintage photographic equipment, she took to it immediately. Soon, however, she asked for a Polaroid camera to make printed photos for her friends and loved ones. Photography’s historical, material aura has yet to disappear. I would like to hope that my daughter’s present-day prints might someday carry memories like those of my family photographs from three quarters of a century ago, sparking imaginations of the past and the present.
Time will tell, and we will see.
Joseph W. Ho (PhD 2017) is the new academic program manager for the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies and public engagement manager for the Department of History. He is a historian of East Asia, US-China encounters, and transnational visual culture and media. His book, Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China was published by Cornell University Press in 2022.
This article was originally published in the 2025 print magazine, History Matters.
