1. Introduction

As the critic and photographer John Berger explained, photographs «quote from appearances;» They have an indexical quality of directing attention at things in the world (Berger and Mohr 1982). They are also social constructions with symbolic meanings. As reflections of «reality,» the possibilities of organized systems led people to imagine grand libraries. For example, in 1859 Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, was spellbound by stereoscopic images. He envisioned an «Imperial, National, or City Stereographic Library» where people could see «any object, natural or artificial» (Trachtenberg 1989:16). However, so long as photographs resided in what were in effect silver mines buried deep in the bowels of research libraries, Holmes’s library was more dream than reality. Thus, in the 1970’s when I first became interested in the sociological use of historic images, access required going to the repository with copy stand, camera, and lights; I carefully photographed the photographs and took notes keyed to my negative numbers to record names, dates, captions and other provenance material.

Today, Holmes’s vision is being realized. Advancing technology that includes digitized images, search and retrieval databases, and the Internet has made it possible for major historical photograph collections to go on-line thus creating searchable data bases of millions of historic images. Sites like the National Archives and Records Administration with more than 124,000 digitized photos are enormously popular. Public libraries in New York City, Denver, and Los Angeles and Historical societies in Minnesota, Oregon, and many other states also maintain online collections, each with hundreds of thousands of photographs. One of the largest sites is the Library of Congress’ “American Memory” As the name suggests, image archives have become a virtual representation of collective memory. [1] The American Memory site describes itself as: …»a multimedia web site of digitized historical documents, photographs, sound recordings, moving pictures, books, pamphlets, maps, and other resources from the Library of Congress’s vast holdings. A historic initiative in its own right, American Memory currently makes available more than 100 collections and more than 9 million individual items to users in the U.S. and throughout the world»…

Figure 1. Up, Salute to the flag in a public school in San Francisco previous to evacuation. 1942; and below, «Rogues on the streets, 11:00 am at school day» (1910).

Most of the photographs come from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, which recently passed the one million mark for digitized images available online. Free and open to the public twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, image banks have quickly become valuable sources of data for students, scholars, and others preparing lectures, doing research, or just browsing. American Memory receives over 10 million page views per month and over 7 million visits per month. As well as the ongoing project of digitizing their collections, American memory accept donations of new materials, if they are deemed historically significant. Approximately 20% of traffic to the Library of Congress site, not just American Memory, comes from teachers [2]. The site makes a specific appeal to schools: «Let us be your “front door” to more than 100 American Memory collections! Here is a ‘teacher’s eye view’ of over 7 million historical documents, photographs, maps, films, and audio recordings. You will find lessons, features, activities, and tips and tricks for using these collections in your classroom. Please join us».

The central question is what is the nature of that memory? The viewer seems confronted by the appearance of history itself, yet photographs cannot be simply accepted, as «proof» of the existence of the object [3]. Visual images are evidence of human productive activity, worked matter, and as such their use and understanding is governed by socially established symbolic codes. Each time a photograph is examined four variables combine to provide meaning: technological capability, photographer’s intent, the image itself, and the perspective of the viewer. In other words, far from being uncontested reflections of reality, photographic images are polysemic social constructions with multiple meanings. The photographer’s intent can frequently be learned or deduced from captions, documentary material, other photographs in a serie, etc. The image itself can be examined from a number of perspectives including the disciplines of semiotics, history, cultural criticism, literature and so on. The goal is to describe as deeply as possible the iconic, indexical and symbolic elements of the image. The intent of the first two investigations is to gather as much evidence of meaning as possible concerning the image in question. The third variable, the standpoint and project of the observer, contributes to the selection and codification of meanings from among those meanings available. Whether, for instance, the viewer focuses on artistic style, symbolic meaning, or historic context — and which of the available meanings is chosen or foregrounded — has to do with the stance and standpoint of the observer.

As Allan Sekula (1983: 194) argued, the meaning of photographs changes in the archive where exchange value trumps whatever original use values were intended by photographer: «…not only are the pictures in archives often literally for sale, but their meanings are up for grabs …. This semantic availability of pictures in archives exhibits the same abstract logic as that which characterizes goods on the marketplace». The consequence of “semantic availability” is that researchers (observers) select from available meanings or construct new meaning for images. Nonetheless, the possibilities are not infinite. Analysis of photographs requires obtaining as much information as possible about the images so as to build a logical context for understanding; from Jeremy Rowe I borrowed a three-fold structure for describing context:

1. Evidence – objective, factual, documentary information provided by the photograph or its context (e.g. format, content within the photograph, attribution to photographic studio based on imprint or printed identification from the period, etc.).
2. Interpretation – deductions built on circumstantial evidence and context that can be clearly verified to and by others (e.g. dating from format or image content, verification of period or more recent written identification, comparison with other known images, etc.).
3. Speculation – subjective attributions that extend the interpretation based on less concrete evidence, or emotional reaction to the image. (Rowe 2002; Margolis and Rowe 2002).

Historical photographs have typically been used for positivist or narrative projects. Most history books, for instance, contain a photograph section intended to simply reinforce the text. My approach, to the contrary, is hermeneutic, critical and ethnographic. In what follows I will not examine urban schooling systematically in any specific city or historic period, though such approaches are essential (cf Cremin, 1988; Cuban 1993). Instead I will offer a brief survey, incorporating examples of the visual in educational research employing a hybrid mix of methods borrowed from grounded theory, symbolic interactionism, semiotics, and critical theory. In providing examples I will try to be clear about which of these hermeneutic practices is being used, and why. I will examine single images as social constructions but also consider larger projects of individual photographers or institutions. Curious about their use and the social settings in which they are produced and consumed, I also examine the archival practices that preserves some images while leaving others to the pure exchange value of the e-bay auction.

2. The Image of the Urban School

Photographs offer an important way to look at the history of urban education in the United States. From Jacob Riis’ muckraking in the slums of New York and Frances Benjamin Johnston’s shots in Washington DC schools at the end of the 19th century, through the Farm Security Administrations files of the 1930’s and 40’s, to the documentation of «juvenile delinquency» and racial integration in the 1950’s and counter-cultures in the 1960’s, urban schools have been the targets of photographers. The photographers’ many different agendas reveal much, both about education and about the ways that powerful groups have used education as a trope for a variety of real or imagined social ills. Photographs bring something special to the study of schools. Singly, they spark imaginations. One after another they have a curious additive effect – perhaps something similar to the way the brain merges 24 frames per second into a moving image. Moreover, juxtaposition, montage, doubling and contradiction are wellknown effects produced by the visual experience itself. Even absent written texts and captions, photographs have a way of raising questions. To again quote John Berger (1982:117): «In every act of looking there is an expectation of meaning.»

It is impossible in this short essay either to do justice to the many ways that photographs can be studied or the controversies over photographic meaning. Nor is it possible to do more that provide a brief, but perhaps indicative, survey of images of urban education. I’ll select a handful of images to reproduce and comment on them briefly. There are many things that can be directly observed in school photographs: socially constructed qualities of teachers and students including gender, race, ability/disability, and social class – in this one can also discern degrees of exclusion, segregation, diversity and integration; details of schools as physical plants – buildings, classrooms, the arrangements of desks and so on; arrangements of surveillance and discipline as suggested by Michele Foucault (1995) and John Tagg (1988) [4] ; and elements of 6 the overt and hidden curricula which are often visible. One also learns, very quickly, that no uniform image of urban schooling emerges (C.f. Tyack, 1974:5). What connects images of urban schooling are contradictory and conflicting representations.