Visual History

The Visual History ("Histoire du Visuel" in French or "Histiconologia") is the result of the works of both Art historians and historians. As far as today billions of images are moving together on the same screen with Internet (from all types, all periods and all civilizations), there is a work to do exceeding history of art. Besides, Art is also a moving notion, including old images, extra-European cultures, decorative art or industrial objects. And Art is mainly seen on a screen. That is why we get now a general visual culture, including Art. That is why Cultural Studies or Visual Studies have been developed. But, we need points of reference and landmarks through a World chronological vision, a general history of the human visual production : Visual History including History of Art, from Prehistory to nowadays. So far, this Visual History gives elements about chronology, geography and the different kind of images.
Art historians worked first on these subjects. Then, during the 1970s, historians such as Michel Vovelle or Marc Ferro from the Ecole des Annales were writing important texts about popular culture and history, cinema and history. In the beginning of the 1990s, with the review L'Image, distributed by Gallimard in France and Harvard University in USA appeared major researches. Laurent Gervereau published in 2000 Les Images qui mentent. Histoire du visuel au XXe siècle (Seuil). That was the first essay about a general Visual History. But the turning point occurred in 2006 : in 2006, Laurent Gervereau edited the World Dictionnary of Images with 275 different specialists from all continents. Then, in 2008, he wrote the first world visual history. Nowadays, these French researches, part of our global history, influence many teachers and researchers all over the world.
The origins
History of Art was the first science to study these visual matters. In the 18th century, Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières comte de Caylus in archeology influenced all the work of description and catalogues. Besides, the German Johann Joachim Winckelmann wrote studies on Greek Antiquity elaborating periodization in styles and history. That was developed in the 20th century, for example by Aby Warburg and then Erwin Panofsky with works about iconology or later by Hans Belting in an anthropological way. That shows that from the old times to nowadays History of Art deals with aesthetics and historical context.
For History of Art, the notion of "Art" is considered to appear during Italian Renaissance ). In anthropology, Jacques Maquet wrote about the separation between Art (pieces done just to be seen) and aesthetisation of what is useful (prehistoric silex or cathedrals). But the notion of Art was in fact moving a lot during the 20th century. This European notion was applied then to extra-European cultures and also to industrial objects (Marcel Duchamp). That is why, for example, the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand chose to show in parallel Maori culture and European culture to avoid any danger of post-colonialist conception.
But, as said Walter Benjamin in 1935, Art deals also with the age of its "reproductibility". That is why we have to separate of course what is "fixed images" and "moving images" but also what are "first images" (oil on canvas, single objects) and "second images" (their posters, postcards, reproductions on videos, on the Net...).
These so numerous visual productions were not at all considered by Art historians. Even for paintings, they studied often only the painters that seemed to them important painters. So, from the 1970s, archeologists, anthropologists, historians began to work on picture subjects. The firsts were Michel Vovelle and the images of Death or during the French Revolution, Maurice Agulhon with Marianne studies or Marc Ferro with cinema. Michel Vovelle organised a first Congress in 1979 on the question of iconography and popular culture. That was also the purpose of prehistorians as André Leroi-Gourhan or later Jean Clottes, archeologists and historians of the Antiquity as Jean-Pierre Vernant, later François Lissarague, historians of the Middle Age (Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, Jean-Claude Schmitt). That was the same from the 1970s to the 1990s for other periods of history (Olivier Christin, Daniel Roche, Joël Cornette). Some of them as Michel Pastoureau, Francis Haskell or Carlo Ginzburg have moved on different subjects (heraldry first for Pastoureau). During the 1980s and the 1990s, the cultural history (Pascal Ory, Jean-François Sirinelli, Jean-Pierre Rioux) and the history of "Lieux de mémoire" Pierre Nora have helped to look at all kind of representations.
But, we have to speak also about other sciences : ethnography, sociology, anthropology or all sciences about communication and mass media. One was very important for methods to analyse images and for various contemporary subjects (modern "mythology") : semiology. Roland Barthes was the most famous and important specialist (he began in the 1950s) with Umberto Eco after him in Italy. All these works were useful to build a general visual history.
During Internet times, a part of Global History
The incredible development of collections
With leisure and tourism, billions of people are now dealing with images. They create a lot of new images and send them on the Net with others made by professionals.
This incredible quantity of images, increasing day after day, explains that to really study all kind of images in human history, 30 years of struggle were necessary. In 1978, Marc Ferro wrote in the article "Image" of the Dictionnaire de la nouvelle histoire that the "image" was the "nevrotic" aspect of history. After various exhibitions, the first searching pluridisciplinar group was founded in a museum, the Museum of Contemporary History in the Invalides in Paris. This museum had world collections from 1870 to nowadays and Laurent Gervereau discovered that most of them (paintings, photographs, posters, movies...) were not considered at all by researchers. That is why he founded in 1992 the Groupe L'Image with Fabrice d'Almeida, Antoine de Baecque, Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, Philippe Buton, Christian Delporte, David El Kenz, Thomas Michael Gunther, Orsula E. Koch, Michael Nicolaïev, Sarah Wilson. The first international colloquium was organised in 1995 in Paris (Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Director Yves Michaud), directed by Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, Laurent Gervereau, Serge Guilbaut (from Vancouver), Gérard Monnier : "Where goes the History of Contemporary Art ?". The second, directed by Laurent Gervereau, was : "Peut-on apprendre à voir ?" ("How to learn to see ?") with 75 different specialists from all disciplines in 1998. During the 1990s, the review L'Image, in English and French, has published authors as Ernst Gombrich, Jean Rouch or Francis Haskell.
Besides, François Lissarague and Jean-Claude Schmitt began to publish with Gallimard in 1996 a collection of books : "Le Temps des Images" ("The Time of Images"). All this prepared the World Dictionnary of Images (2006).
The pedagogical and scientific necessity
Why is it necessary to work now on the history of all the human visual production ? Because, all over the World, children have to know what is what. To read, to write, to count, are basic aims in schools. But, in the Internet times, to identify the images is also very important. So far, the children need a general chronology, they need to understand the great civilisations and to know the different kind of images (Art or not Art).
In April 2006, a colloquium was organised by Christian Delporte, Laurent Gervereau and Denis Maréchal for Institut national de l'audioviduel (INA, "National Audiovisual Institute") in Paris : "Quelle est la place des images en histoire ?" ("What is the Place of Images in History ?"). It showed clearly two aspects : images are one of the usefull sources in history, as texts or oral sources ; we cannot work only on History of Art in the 21st century, we have also the necessity to work on the general history of the visual production.
The same year was published the World Dictionnary of Images. So, 2006 was really a turning point for these studies. It appeared then that this history is build through three great periods : the beginnings in Prehistory and the great civilizations ; the history of Art ; the industrial multiplication of images. So, after the great civilations and their exchanges and influences, we had Art born during the Italian Renaissance and such artists as Vasari. Art conquered the entire Planet in the 20th century. Besides, in the 19th century, the industrial multiplication of images was developed: time of paper first (press, engravings, stamps, posters, packaging, postcards...) from 1850 to 1913 ; time of the projection with movies (1914 to 1959), then the time of the screen with tv (from 1960 to 2000), before the age of accumulation with Internet (Visual History in the 20th Century ).
Apart from this history, appeared the necessity to combine history of Art, history, semiology and other sciences to analyse or "decode" images. Laurent Gervereau in 1994 wrote a general series of questions and Martine Joly did another essay in 1998. Of course, for pedagogical activities, there should be done also some initiations to cultural concrete practices.
Last works, methods and the new World of images
Visuel History or Histiconologia is a global history. But it needs also very specialised studies, by periods, continent or countries, authors, themas, or even image.
Many useful works have been done already, of course through Art Studies, Cultural Studies or Visual Studies in USA and all over the World. But France was the first country to work on this global Visual History. It was possible as far as many authors developed specialised studies about various corpus. Michel Pastoureau worked, for example, on colours and symbols. Michel Frizot published a New History of Photography. Directed by Michel Poivert (President from 1995 to 2010), Clément Chéroux and André Gunthert, the Société française de photographie has also changed the points of view (with the review Etudes photographiques beginning in 1997). About the cinema ground, contributions are numerous : Michel Marie (), Antoine de Baecque, Laurent Mannoni in the Cinémathèque française specialist of pre-cinema, Laurent Véray and the review 1895. Revue d'histoire du cinéma, Nicole Brenez for experimental cinema, Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit and the Second World War, Sylvie Lindeperg and the Second World War seen between 1944 and 1969... Christian Delporte has founded The Society for the History of Medias (2000) which did a big work (the review Le Temps des médias (first issue in 2003) about press, radio, tv, Internet...). In History of Art, Laurence Bertrand Dorléac as Philippe Dagen use both history and history of Art, as Daniel Arasse.
These works are completed by works from other disciplins : the psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron, the sociologist Bruno Latour, the philosophers (Marie-José Mondzain, Paul Virilio, Georges Vigarello, Jacques Rancière), the anthropologist (Barbara Glowczewski), a movie maker as Jean-Luc Godard, some directors of exhibitions as Pontus Hulten, Jean Clair or Jean-Hubert Martin (in Switzerland, Harald Szeemann, Jacques Hainard or Marc-Olivier Gonseth).
This is for French researches, but now there are researches all over the World. Some are "laminated" researches as there is now a "laminated history" ("histoire stratifiée") : from the very local, to the region, to the country, to the continent, to global history. Anyway, for the visual subject, everything is moving : the production, the sciences, the pedagogy.
The historian Jacques Le Goff, who directed Annales School, wrote in the newspaper Le Monde (December 15, 2006) about the World Dictionnary of Images : "President of the Institute of Images, Laurent Gervereau publishes a book that will be essential. He built a team to work on the question of all types of images, a team of exceptional specialists, artists or celebrated intellectuals or brilliant young researches. We know that, after the last years of the 20th century, humanity is entered into the time of images. The sum realised by Gervereau is in the continuity of his book of method See, Understand, Analyse Images (La Découverte, first edition in 1994) and of the reflections about the new and fundamental object of the human contemporary reality, the visual, visual that he has studied through his book History of Visual in the 20th Century (« Points histoire », Le Seuil, 2000). (...) Today, we entered with Internet in the "Time of accumulation" and this book seems to be the first attempt to decode this new world of mass images in a global World."
Bibliography
Some pluridiciplinar examples :
* Laurent Gervereau (dir.), Dictionnaire mondial des images, Paris, Nouveau Monde, 2006 (réédition en poche)
* Laurent Gervereau, Images, une histoire mondiale, Paris, Nouveau monde/CNDP, 2008
* Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie : Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft, Munich, Wilhelm Fink, 2001
* Jacques Maquet, The Aesthetic Experience : An Anthropologist Looks at the Visual Arts, Yale University Press, 1986
* Régis Debray, Vie et mort de l'image. Une histoire du regard en Occident, Paris, Gallimard, 1992
* Serge Gruzinski, Les Quatre parties du monde. Histoire d'une mondialisation, Paris, La Martinière, 2004
* François Cheng, Souffle-Esprit, Paris, Seuil, 1989
* Marie-José Mondzain, Image, icône, économie : Les Sources byzantines de l'imaginaire contemporain, Seuil, 1997
* François Lissarague, Vases grecs. Les Athéniens et leurs images, Paris, Hazan, 1999
* Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le Corps des images. Essai sur la culture visuelle au Moyen-Age, Paris, Gallimard, 2002
* Michel Pastoureau, Dictionnaire des couleurs de notre temps. Symbolique et société, Paris, Bonneton, 1992
* Hubert Damisch, L'Origine de la perspective, Paris, Flammarion, 1987
* Daniel Arasse, Le sujet dans le tableau. Essai d'iconographie analytique, Paris, Flammarion, 1997
* Olivier Christin, Une révolution symbolique, l'iconoclasme huguenot et la reconstruction catholique, Paris, Minuit, 1991
* Daniel Roche, La culture des apparences. Une histoire du vêtement XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Arthème Fayard, 1989
* Joël Cornette, Le Roi de guerre. Essai sur la souveraineté dans la France du Grand Siècle, Paris, Payot, 2000
* Michel Vovelle, Gaby Vovelle, Vision de la mort et de l'au-delà en Provence du XVe au XXe siècle, d'après les autels des âmes du purgatoire, Paris, Colin, 1970
* Maurice Agulhon, Marianne au combat. L'imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 188 à 1914, Paris, Flammarion, 1979
* Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art. Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France, Oxford, Phaidon Press, 1976
* Philippe Kaenel, Le métier d'illustrateur, 1830-1880, Paris, Messene, 1996
* Gerd Krumeich, Jeanne d'Arc in der Geschichte. Historiographie-Politik-Kultur, Sigmaringen, Jan Thoebecke Verlag, 1989
* Philippe Dagen, Le Silence des peintres. Les artistes face à la Grande Guerre, Paris, Arthème Fayard, 1996
* Walter Benjamin, L'oeuvre d'art à l'ère de sa reproductibilité technique, essai écrit en 1935 puis remanié et diffusé de façon posthume.
* Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, L'Art de la défaite, 1940-1944, Paris, Seuil, 1993
* Quentin Bajac, Clément Chéroux (dir.), La subversion des images : surréalisme, photographie, film, Paris, Centre Pompidou, 2009
* Michel Poivert, La Photographie contemporaine, Paris, Flammarion, 2002 (réed. augmentée 2010)
* Christian Delporte, La France dans les yeux. Une histoire de la communication politique de 1930 à nos jours, Paris, Flammarion, 2007
* Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, Paris, Gallimard, 1998
* Jacques Rancière, Le Destin des images, Paris, La Fabrique, 2003
* Le Temps des médias, n°18 "Histoire de l'Internet. L'Internet dans l'histoire", Paris, Nouveau Monde, 2012
* Cabu et Laurent Gervereau, Le monde des images. Comprendre les images pour ne pas se faire manipuler, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2004
* Laurent Gervereau, Voir, comprendre, analyser les images, Paris, La Découverte, 1994
* Laurent Gervereau, Les images mentent ? Manipuler les images ou manipuler le public, Paris, www.gervereau.com, 2011

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