Open Access

As cultural products, images are infused with notions of gender – notions, which are, of course, specific to the times and places in which these images originate. For gender historians, they are fascinating artefacts, but often also frustratingly difficult to interpret. This dossier presents the work of historians who look at gender through visual sources. The contributors engage with a wide variety of visual sources (including book illustrations, posters, photographs, and comics) to explore gender history in a range of places and moments in time. Our aim is to examine how historical actors have used images as they negotiate gender, and how we as historians can incorporate these images into our analyses of gender history. Not surprisingly we have discovered that working with images as historians is complicated – even more complicated than working with more conventional text-based sources – but that it is also fascinating and fun. So, we still want to do it!

For this article, I would like to present the process of my becoming aware of the work of Charlotte Paige Carroll, an African American woman photographer active in Chicago during the 1920s-1940s. This period, notably marked by the Harlem Renaissance – a flourishing of African American art and culture – fostered a modern Black subjectivity known as the “New Negro”. More of an international movement of Black consciousness than a phenomenon that was limited to a particular geography, the Harlem Renaissance promoted a period of cultural growth, economic investment and political agency. It is within this context that Carroll, with her partner J.C. Schlink, owned and operated Electric Studio. Electric Studio’s photographs were published in nationally circulating newspapers and magazines, and aspects of Carroll’s life were chronicled in the Black media of the day, yet despite the significant contributions of Carroll or Electric Studio their extensive efforts do not appear in the chronicle of photography’s history. For numerous reasons this absence is a history in and of itself that necessitates careful consideration in both methodology and approach.

My analysis of ambivalent representations of gender and sexuality in children’s book illustrations centers on publications for middle-class German readers between 1776 and 1845 – a somewhat overlooked yet foundational milieu of modern children’s literature. I have found that these images at times invoke hegemonic ideas about gender while at others deviate from those norms – occasionally even within the same text. Materials created explicitly for children and youth offer special insight into ideologies such as those that structure gender and sexuality. This is true both because they can be more heavy-handed in their ideological messages – with a mind toward what is appropriate for the child viewer – but also because they remind us of the limits of didacticism when we consider the young reader’s/viewer’s unpredictable response. Thus, ambiguity is itself a characteristic of the gendered values presented in children’s books. At various historical moments, children’s illustrations upheld expectations of adult visual culture while breaking or sidestepping others.

Anlass und Gegenstand dieses Aufsatzes ist eine außergewöhnliche „Sammlung in der Sammlung“. Im Jahr 2022 wurde dem FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum in Berlin ein Nachlass übergeben: das Lebenswerk des Privatsammlers Peter Plewka (1938-2022), der über 5600 historische Ansichtskarten seines Heimatbezirks Kreuzberg zusammentrug. Die Karten stammen aus den Jahren 1890 bis 1945 und zeigen nicht nur touristische Motive, sondern mehrheitlich Fotografien von Hausfassaden, Straßenzügen und Geschäften.

Vorstudie im Auftrag des Bundesministeriums für Wirtschaft und Energie. Im Sinne einer Machbarkeitsstudie liefert diese Vorstudie somit ein Gerüst forschungskonzeptioneller und praktischer Überlegungen, die einer umfangreichen wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von politisch motivierten Adoptionsverfahren in der DDR zu Grunde zu legen sind.