Los Angeles

One of the reasons for the difficulty of moving away in them from this effect of reality is without a doubt ' ' culture of instantneo' ': daily ours practical to also take off photographs of the life, registering the history of our family and friends and, is clearly, molding our souvenirs of this history. Then why we do not have to trust the photographers? After all, the courts consider the photos and the videos accurate tests of robery, murder or police violence (as in the well-known case in Los Angeles some years behind). The French writer Paul Valry (1871-1945) suggested that our proper criteria of historical veracity had started to include the question: ' ' Such fact could, as well as it is told, to have been photographed? ' '. It would not have been surpreso when knowing that the more conscientious historians are each time of that the photographs, paintings, films and other images can help them in its attempts of reconstruction of the past. For example, a North American historian of Brazil, Robert Levine, published some photograph books with commentaries on its possible utility to write social history. Others, as Robert Rosenstone, defends ' ' escrita' ' of history by means of the accomplishment of films, what he was called ' ' historiofotia' ' , substituting or if uniting with ' ' historiografia' '. Some studious, intellectual ones, they defend with enthusiasm this trend, while they reject it to others, alleging that the camera is not trustworthy. In this debate, my opinion is that the increasing photograph use and other images as historical sources can very enrich our knowledge and our understanding of the past, since that let us can develop techniques of ' ' critical of fonte' ' fellow creatures to that they had been developed have much time to evaluate written depositions. As already John Ruskin in century XIX noticed the English critic, the photograph deposition, as well as the one of witnesses in the court, ' ' cruzado&#039 is very useful if to know to make an examination; '.