The Colours of the Past

Even if language has traditionally been considered the leading historical medium, our idea of the past is informed just as much by images. Like written sources, images reconstruct history, but only in snippets – they are fragments on the search for lost times. This book presents a diverse range of visual reconstruction phenomena in the media of painting, photography, and film. This overview shows that the diverse forms of visualization – from the detailed reconstructive history paintings of the nineteenth century to documentary photos and "reenactments" in contemporary video – all present very different possibilities for imagining the past. It turns out that images do not just illustrate historical facts but are themselves manifestations of history.