Reflexive Images

Although images are an integral part of historical research today, it is quite unusual that a historian is conceiving the image as a heuristic model instead of interpreting it in terms of representation (of an event or "its" time). In this article, I argue that in a long-term dialogue with image theory and by taking photographs of monuments and memory sites, Reinhart Koselleck discovered the image as an experimental space for thinking of historical time differently from linear narrative. Koselleck's photographs of memory sites in particular may be viewed as an invitation to explore the intricate relations between individual perception now and then, experience, memory, and its cultural (trans-)formations. Seen this way, images can provoke new questions and give impulses for methodological reflection in historical research

Cultural memory · Heuristic · Perception · Reflexivity · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy, History, and Historiography · Photography and Visual Culture