Index and Time
In the first decades of the twentieth century, understandings of how photographs served the study of history again changed. These changes emerged from practices at Paris’s municipal historical institutions and within publishing houses. Attention to the pages of illustrated histories, or photohistories, reveals both the increased presence of photographs, often used as indexes of historical places, and a new mode of interpreting older photographs as a haunting slice of lost time and a way of accessing emotional links to the past. Photographs became particularly haunting in the years after World War I, when nostalgia for the much-photographed prewar fin-de-siècle, or Paris 1900, made Parisians seem stranded in the present.