I’m interested in history. I’m interested in photography. I’m interested in the way photographs frame history, and the way history frames photographs. If you share these interests, this may be for you.
There are many excellent sites that tell you what happened on this date in history. There’s also at least one excellent site about iconic photographs. There are none, as far as I know, that combine the two to look at each one in light of the other. That’s what I aim for Picture This Date to do.
Every day is the anniversary of something, but not all anniversaries are equally important, and furthermore, there aren’t definite and iconic photographs of every event. Some events are photographed because they’re important; some become important because of the way they are photographed. There’s nothing unique about Florence Owens Thompson’s fate, or Nguyễn Văn Lém’s, except for the fact that they were photographed and the photographs were picked up by the media. Other events are so monumental that you could choose almost any photograph of them and they’d still be iconic. Filling 365 days of this stuff is hard: some days, nothing much happened, or what happened wasn’t documented in any iconic or aesthetically satisfying way. Other days, so much and so important events happened that it’s hard to choose just one picture. Both the mundane photograph of the important event and the important photograph of the mundane are eligible subjects for this website.
Because I know I won’t be able to update every day, I’ve built almost a month’s buffer of scheduled posts, plus a few posts scattered around based on particularly important photos or events. It’s the nature of this kind of thing that some days will be more exciting than others: many essays have been written about this photo, but I doubt many have been written about this. I promise, the more exciting, shocking, and interesting stuff is coming, in due time.
If this is at all interesting to you, I hope you’ll follow along, and if you know something that should be on this website, I’m taking submissions.
I’m trying to be balanced, but I’ve noticed that certain biases result from the parameters of this thing: each entry must be an event, there must exist a decent picture of it on the internet, it must have some historic importance, and it must have happened 10+ years ago. Naturally, stuff that happened before the invention of photography is out. The United States, in particular, seems to be intent on cramming twice as much history as everyone else into the 19th and 20th centuries to make up for its relatively short history as a nation. In addition, most of these events are extraordinarily well documented photographically. Even though not everything that happened in the last hundred years happened in America, the internet photographic record sometimes makes it seem so.
Some things that crop up again and again: war (particularly WWII and the Cold War), the American Civil Rights struggle, the space race, political revolutions. They weren’t only important, they seem to have had a natural tendency to produce iconic imagery.
I’m aiming to keep it up for a year, until each date has one post (2012 is a leap year, so it works out). Think of it as a daily diversion, or as raw data for any number of essays on the relationship between photography and history.
Sep 22, 2011