Picturing the past

Pictures and photographs are types of evidence particularly suited to primary school children, as

• they may be used with all ages of children and abilities, as difficulties of readability are avoided
• they may be incorporated in various types of lesson: they may be discussed in a whole-class situation if enlarged on a chart or overhead projector or used with small groups or individuals
• they give the teacher opportunities to encourage the development of higher-order critical skills such as deduction and recognition of bias – skills which could be difficult to practise using documentary sources.

Paintings and drawings

A wide range of paintings and drawings are available from many historical periods. Paintings and drawings have some drawbacks as sources: they are highly selective, they portray the rich much more frequently than the poor, and the contents of the representations were often distorted or manipulated by the artist to please the subject or patron for reasons of vanity or to make a political, religious or other statement. However, the paintings can provide a great deal of information and can give the child an impression of what life was like in the past. Older children can also be taught to ‘read’ a picture and recognise some of the conventions and images which artists used to depict their subjects.

Many excellent paintings from the past are available in relatively inexpensive formats:

• many galleries and historic houses publish copies of their holdings in slide, postcard, poster or book form
• calendars are often available from galleries, companies and other institutions
• art books and exhibition catalogues are often expensive, but most will be available from local libraries
• some libraries have framed copies of prints from national and other galleries available for loan
• many pictures are reproduced in textbooks and reference works
• an increasing number of galleries are providing access to their collections on the internet and on CD-ROM
• sometimes children can view the picture in the gallery or in the house in which it is displayed, and this is often the most effective approach.

Items which can be obtained in poster or calendar form or in textbooks will be more suited for use in a whole-class situation, while smaller reproductions may be used with groups. If a drawing or painting has local connections and would be particularly useful in the school, a gallery may agree to photograph it and print a large-scale copy. However, this is usually an expensive service.

Photographs

Photography dates from the middle of the nineteenth century. Initially it was a slow and awkward process, but it was infinitely more flexible and cheaper than painting. Huge collections of photographs were taken throughout the second half (particularly the last quarter) of the nineteenth century and during the twentieth century. The Lawrence Collection and the Poole Collection in the National Library and others such as the Father Brown Collection, for example, contain thousands of prints from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As the cost of photography fell and the technology improved, photography became available to more and more people and less skill was required. Photographs are therefore much more likely to show the lives of ordinary people. They are also much more readily available: scenes of Irish towns and localities included in the Lawrence Collection, for example, are often reproduced and sold in picture shops and in interior furnishers. They are also frequently seen in books of photographs, local histories, calendars and posters.

Other visual sources

It should be remembered that visual sources include many other types of images and media including examples of early art such as that completed by Stone Age peoples in the caves of southern France and Spain, paintings adorning tombs such as those on the interiors of the pyramids, decoration on pottery, stained-glass images, statues and even postcards and advertisements.

EXEMPLAR 13 - Using a picture (first to fourth classes)

EXEMPLAR 14 - Comparing two pictures first to sixth classes

Change and continuity through photographs

Comparing a photograph or picture of a scene in the past with the present appearance of the place can be an excellent way of allowing children to focus on change and continuity. Lawrence Collection photographs and prints from similar sources are ideally suited to this type of activity, and over a thousand of the locations included in this collection were re-photographed in the 1990s as part of the Lawrence Project.

An old photograph could also be compared with a contemporary photograph of the scene taken by the teacher. These could be examined in the classroom or included in a trail leaflet so that children will compare the old photograph with the site today.

Children will make more acute observations if their attention is directed in the first instance to specific items or aspects of the scene, for example particular houses or shops, certain items of street furniture or forms of transport. Questioning and discussion should direct attention to aspects which have changed, but also to items which have remained the same. Often the upper floors of buildings in towns will be largely unchanged, while the ground floors will have been altered. Thatched roofs may have been replaced by slate, but the heights of buildings may retain the original line.

This type of exercise does not require very old photographs. Much useful work can be completed by comparing items in relatively recent photographs with their present appearance: for example, the background of family photographs will often include furniture, the outside of a house, the garden or a car, all of which may have changed. In rapidly growing urban areas the appearance of the environment may have altered relatively quickly. If possible, schools or teachers might consider recording some of these changes as they occur so that a photographic record is preserved for future history work.

Follow-up activities, especially for older children and urban-based photographs, might include:

• relating photographs to the Ordnance Survey maps of the area
• identifying buildings and features that have survived and that would be worthy of preservation
• identifying buildings and other developments which have not been in keeping with, or sympathetic to, their surroundings.

Bias and accuracy in pictures

Older children should also be made aware of the bias which often existed in the work of artists in the past and the dangers that this can pose for the historian. Comparing the view of the Irish hedge school which forms the setting of the incident portrayed in William Mulready’s The Last In and the caricature of a hedge school used to illustrate William Carleton’s Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry should highlight the exaggeration of the latter.

Both scenes convey the rudimentary nature of the schoolrooms and the apparent disorganisation of these schools, which did not employ class or group teaching, but Carleton’s illustration, designed for an unsympathetic English audience, portrays the disorder as riotous and savage behaviour. Children who would have completed some work on the nature of the hedge schools could be led to discuss why the rooms appeared disorganised to English and other visitors (they were accustomed to seeing pupils in schools for the poor sitting in ordered rows) and why this has been exaggerated in the second picture.

Children might also be encouraged to think about the accuracy of school and other semi-formal photographs as evidence of children’s appearance and clothing. Asking children to consider the preparations which they undergo for the school photograph today could lead them to question whether the children in older photographs were always dressed in the way shown.