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We discussed texts as primary sources in a previous lesson, but [book appears]

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did you know that images can be primary sources, too? Yep that's right: paintings, [series of images flash by]

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drawings, cartoons, photographs--they can all serve as primary sources. Well,

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images come in handy when we study the past for several reasons. First, a picture [painting of people]

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is worth a thousand words... by which we mean images can tell us things that texts [different painting]

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don't. For example, a diarist in Victorian England might have plenty to say about [person writes]

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current events the 19th century, but was the diarist us snazzy dresser? Did he [diarist speaks]

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suffer from any debilitating physical conditions like male pattern baldness? [diarist loses hair]

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Did he have to get his photo taken at a local studio, or did he have enough cash [diarist gets photo taken]

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to go on vacation and have his portrait taken at the seaside... in Victorian [diarist by the sea]

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England? Yeah, sorry about that. Well, these are the kinds of things we can [queen of England appears]

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learn from an image and not a text. Another great thing about images as

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primary sources is that you don't need to speak another language to understand [person reads newspaper]

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them. You don't have to know Italian in order to study and understand the

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gorgeous paintings of saints and martyrs sprinkled throughout old churches [person walks through Italy]

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in Rome. You don't have to know Spanish to look and cringe at Francisco Goya's

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artwork about the Peninsular War... Which brings us the another reason why [Goya's Peninsular War art]

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images are awesome: they make us feel every feeling under the sun. Even the [spinning head with different expressions]

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ever-elusive feeling of laughing so hard that we (fart noise). Seriously though, images

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sometimes bring on strong emotions that text simply can't, and those emotions can [person thinks, then painting flashes]

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help us better understand historical events. So yeah, let's give a big cheer for [people cheer]

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images as primary sources. Don't celebrate too much though; just like

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textual primary sources, images can be biased. In those pre-Photoshop days [photographer captures hippopotamus]

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too, there, people. Why? Because they're produced by human beings and we're all

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biased in one way or another. For example, not everyone in the world has access to [person reclines near ship and cameras]

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cameras, or film, or canvas and paint, which means that all times and places aren't

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represented equally. Like, you're likely getting the perspective of the wealthy [wealthy person's portrait]

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when you have early photos, right? And people who create images might disagree

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about which subjects are important and which ones aren't. But let's face it-- [people argue at zoo]

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images can lie or be misconstrued. Folks buy photoshop for a [lemur drinks soda]

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reason. Another problem with images is that they can be difficult to interpret. [egg people]

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Say you open a family photo album from a century ago. If you have nothing to go on [album sits open]

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save the photos themselves, you might find yourselves with lots of questions, like [old photos]

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"Who are these people? and "Where was this picture taken?" and "Why do these two guys

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look like they're about to kill each other?" Well, finally you don't always know

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an image's intended audience. Is this photo of a man on the beach nothing more [man with sunglasses takes vacation selfie]

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than a selfie he took on vacation, or is it meant to go in a tourist brochure, or

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was it taken by James Bond, you know, working? Ws you find yourself looking at [James Bond appears]

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images in the course of this course--see we did there--remember that they can be [person views paintings in museum]

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enormously useful as primary sources. And no, that doesn't include your second

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cousin's tattoo of a cat in a cardboard box. Though... that is pretty meow-velous. [cat tattoo]

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