The Historian's Eye

From 2009 to 2014 Matthew Frye Jacobson crisscrossed the United States, taking thousands of photographs. He documented a wide range of issues roiling the republic: intractable racism, a yawning wealth gap, xenophobia, violence, and a media-saturated, surveillant nation. He tracked citizens’ movements challenging inequalities, and the rise of reactionary counter movements. In The Historian's Eye he publishes a selection of these photographs and nearly as many meditations about the nature of U.S. history and its shaping of contemporary America. In place of traditional scholarship, Jacobson wanted to “see and frame” the nation's social conditions (pp. 154, 5). Additionally, the author speculates about how photography as medium shapes conceptions of past and present, how to interpret photographs, and how scholarly and documentary inquiry intersect and diverge. The book consists of six photo-essays, with introductory and concluding reflections. The Historian's Eye explores Barack Obama's iconicity, the financial crisis, and vacant storefronts; it records a road trip taken just after Obama's inauguration, probes the rabid resistance to his presidency, and considers the hopes invested in the forty-fourth president. The author encounters industrial brownfields and shopping carts adrift in shuttered malls, Occupy encampments and Tea Party rallies, vernacular war monuments, and border fences. Our polarized nation confronts a “withered sense of commonweal,” and Jacobson is preoccupied with the tension between “better history,” words he captured painted on a New York City wall, and someone's graffittied rejoinder, “bitter future” (p. 7

Art · Art history · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Presidency · Racism · Scholarship · Sociology · Vernacular · Xenophobia · History · Law · Photography and Visual Culture