Questions To Ask Of Primary Sources
When using film or photographic sources, or any other sort of primary evidence, we need to ask a number of questions. Here is a checklist:

What type of source is it? We need to be clear about the media used (photograph, cine film, newsreel, video or other source); whether it is a copy or taken from the original negative; and any technical information such as gauge of film stock (8 mm, 16 mm or 35 mm), whether colour, black and white or tinted, and so on.

When was it created? Dating our source is of crucial importance when it comes to interpretation and looking for secondary source information.

Who was it produced by? While it may not always be possible to put a name to the photographer or cinematographer, it should be possible to find some information about the creator. Studio photographs are usually labelled. Photographs from private individuals may have information on the reverse and there may be information about commercial film processors on packaging, film containers etc.

Why was it created? Answering this question is likely to involve interpretation of motives and purposes. Clearly the source conveys an intentional message on the part of the creator and/or the subjects. So we might ask to whom this message was addressed and for what purpose. In the case of our patch girls, John tells us that these were commercial photographs of working women who were seen as curious objects at the time. Many were sold as postcards and some to collectors.

We need to be aware that with many types of source, including photographs and film, there is always the chance that they have been modified or altered in some way. For instance, many photographs taken of revolutionary leaders in early Soviet Russia were “doctored” during the Stalinist era to remove figures who had fallen out of favour or been liquidated.

What does the source reveal in unintentional testimony? Here we are again engaged in interpreting the views and values of the creator of the source and, possibly, those of the subjects. In our example the fact that women in the coal industry were such curiosities that photographers sought them out as subjects and customers purchased the images, says something about attitudes to women and work in the mid-Victorian era. The photograph intentionally shows the dignity and pride of the women, and the large pickaxe and the equipment they carry accentuate their small stature and strength. John argues that the photographer deliberately exaggerated certain features in order to increase the curiosity of the scene. At the time, there was a major debate over whether it was right for women to undertake dangerous heavy manual work more usually associated with men. For many middle class commentators this type of work destroyed the women’s feminine attributes. Such images may have depicted the physical strength and pride of women pit workers, yet this attitude transgressed contemporary ideas about how women ought to behave. As John puts it:

‘Pictorial representations thus provided ammunition for the debate about the disturbing physical and moral implications of the work.’ (John, 1984, p 187)

What is the wider historical significance of the source? Unintentional testimony often leads to a discussion of broader historical issues. In the case of the photograph of the two patch workers we are taken into the field of mid-Victorian social attitudes towards women and work. Here we have hard evidence that it was not only men who performed heavy, dangerous and dirty industrial manual labour in the Victorian coal mining industry. Moreover, as Angela V. John has shown, in the 1880s and again just before the First World War, women pit brow workers struggled to defend the legal right to perform this work in the face of vigorous campaigns to exclude them. This struggle connected one of the lowest status and most oppressed groups of women with the broader struggles for women’s political, social and economic rights. In recovering the largely overlooked and poorly documented history of the “pit lasses”, John makes exemplary use of photographic primary sources precisely because she does not assume the pictorial evidence “speaks for itself”.

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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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