Contenu du sommaire : Une image ne sert-elle qu'à illustrer ?

What to do with the images received from actors in the story? Based on the example of the investigation conducted in January 2015 in Brooklyn on the mutiny in Attica (New York State, September 1971), but also on an initial research into the autobiographies of criminals and on a work conduced in collaboration with the photographer Mathieu Pernot on the visual archives of a psychiatric asylum, the article examines the historical uses of the photographic archives of institutions (the police, criminal anthropology and psychiatry). How, at the same time, can we make room for the forgotten subjects of history and produce a narrative of collective history?

This article focuses on the first feature film directed by Jean-Gabriel Périot, Une jeunesse allemande (2015). In this documentary, the director tells the story of the Red Army Faction, a terrorist group active in West Germany in the 1970s, based solely on audiovisual archives. Our approach does not aim to directly analyze the uses of the archive that the filmmaker develops in A German Youth, but rather to examine the discourse of these uses, whether it comes from the filmmaker himself, journalists, activists or mere spectators.

The making of the images and the publication of this production in books or specialized magazines belongs to the field of architecture, making architects, since the Renaissance, real professionals of the images, often involved in the edition of their own works like Palladio, Le Corbusier or Rem Koolhaas. This situation induces specific practices and skills, which also determine the field of Architectural History, closely linked to that of practice. In this area where the creation of works involves long and complex processes, graphic representations have played a special role since the 16th century, which reflects in the historical studies. Today, the creation and development of collections and specialized archive centers is drawing even greater attention to the quality and materiality of documents. But the field is not immune to a contradiction: the editions that are most sensitive to the scientific requirements of the authors, do not always have the means to correctly reproduce the images, while editions which have this faculty oppose to the authors imperatives linked to the expectations off the public.

Mostly intented to press release, the editorial treatment of satirical pictures in retrospective books raises a number of questions—their function being reduced to a purely illustrative element, to begin with. Often disconnected with the text, thus the caricature is deprived of its own intentionality. Most of the time, each angle adopted determines the selection of iconography. The iconographic source lacks of the rigour demanded by traditional historical sources. Strongly connoted by definition, satirical pictures which benefits from the legitimacy of prestigious or scholarly publications present multiple challenges when brought to the public eye—nowadays in particular, in an era when polemics and approximations are legion and the spreading more and more sped up on the Internet.

Are history books picture books? Interrogating the double page of history textbooks (text and image) as a structural fact of school publishing, the article proposes to consider this organization as an heterotopia. The detour through the extracurricular category of French history shows how it is crumbling under the double effect of digital editorialization and the emergence of visual studies. Inscribed in the logic of a publishing history, this reflection shows how the use of images escapes the discourse of order of disciplines and text. History books are not picture books.

The National Library of France includes nearly 7 millions digitized items online, available in its digital library called Gallica, and 1 million items available in its images bank. However, faced with such a digital treasure, users who want to look for specific images need to be guided. How to spot the images of the prints (books, newspapers…) that are not indexed? is there any hope that one day artificial intelligence will allow to find the right images for any subject in the press and the digitized books? Why is it so important to source properly the resources found that way, in order to re-use them? These are some of the many questions this article strives to answer, following the guideline of the images of Notre-Dame de Paris.

Between expressionism and euphemism, representations of violence against children in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, from one sensitive regime to another. The issue of/debate over childhood is increasingly taken into account during the last decades of the 19th century—thus opening upon a new 20th century, by the end of which the various crimes perpetuated against children will have been identified and named. Meanwhile, the hierarchy of the representable—that is the presentable and the visible—seems to have been modified. While Belle Epoque's pictures neither backed down from evoking sexual relations with children nor from staging the bloodiest cruelties inflicted on child martyrs, no one today would dare display beaten up and bloody children. Besides, the iconographic production of paedophilia denunciation is relatively non-existent. This observation leads us to question this evolution, this mutation of the order of the possible and visible in the lights of cultural and perhaps ideological mutations. It also leads us to question the modification of emotional registers that have affected 20th century history, and to try to understand what is at stake in the variability of the representable. Indeed, when discussing sexuality, the 21th century is as shy as the 19th century. Even for prevention campaign, it would rather not shock its audience than use crude and explicit pictures. This choice, which speaks volumes regarding the suspicion that keeps lingering above the notion of representation, could also underline a predicament when discussing childhood.