Family snapshots, posed photos, cine film and even home videos provide a wealth of primary source material for historians. In recent years a number of important TV documentaries have drawn heavily upon amateur film and photographic archives. Among these are The British Empire in Colour (Carlton), Britain at War in Colour (Carlton) and Ken Burns’ magnificent trilogy The West, The American Civil War and Jazz. Now educational projects of many sorts, in schools, colleges, local history societies, evening classes and universities are discovering new material and making it available in digital format via the Internet or on DVD. But as with all types of primary historical source material, the evidence does not “speak for itself”. It requires historical interpretation in order to reveal its meaning and significance. This article outlines a method for analysing film and photography as a primary source and discusses some of the problems encountered by the social historian.

What Is A Primary Source?
Studying history is really the process of interpreting the past. Primary sources are the raw material historians draw upon in their investigations. They are direct evidence of the past. As such they differ from secondary sources (books, articles, radio and TV programmes or unpublished theses written or presented by historians) in that they actually come from the period under investigation. A primary source may often be an item or printed source produced in the period being studied; but it could just as well be a photograph or reel of film shot at the time. Our primary source may have been restored, reproduced or reprinted, but it remains a primary source nonetheless. An example of this is the photograph of Tredegar patch girls reproduced in Angela V. John’s By the Sweat of Their Brows. Women Workers at the Victorian Coal Mines.

Tredegar patch girls in the 1860s, courtesy of Manchester City Gallery. One of forty-nine such photographs. Written on the back of each was ‘Copies may be had at any time’.

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Content last updated: 07/01/2005

About our expert

Alan Sennett is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University and lectures in modern history, politics and film at Manchester and Liverpool universities. He also lectures and tutors for a number of adult educational organisations in addition to freelance research and writing. He studied modern history at Sheffield City Polytechnic, took his MA in Political Sociology at Leeds and a PhD at Manchester University. Research interests include political organisations in the Spanish Civil War, the cinema of Empire, Soviet and Weimar cinemas and the documentary film movement in Britain.

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