What is the context?
What is the context?
"Nothing exists, and therefore can be understood, in isolation from its context, for it is context that gives meaning to what we think and do". Professor Paul Bate.
We live in an ever-changing world. Which means that the context of how we view events in our lives may be viewed differently in the future.
For instance, this is a beautiful painting of Madame Pierre Gautreau, painted by John Singer Sargent.
This is the second version of the painting. The original painting, the one exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1884, was slightly different. It showed one strap of her gown hanging down over her right shoulder.
That does not sound very controversial. But the standards of ‘decency’ (and therefore the context) were very different 139 years ago. A newspaper report said that Madame Gautreau’s “suggestively coquettish pose and revealing costume [caused a scandal]”. One critic for L'Artiste wrote about "the indecency of her dress that looks like it is about to fall off." The dress looked exactly as it appears in this painting, except for the strap painted as though it had fallen off her shoulder! A study at the Tate shows a partially finished painting with only one strap.
Because of the fuss, Sargent changed the name of the painting to ‘Madame X’, and later repainted the strap, to match the other, as you can see in this painting. The scandal about the painting meant that Sargent received no more portrait commissions in Paris and, to save his career, he moved to London.
When we look back at photographs or read stories about our ancestors, it can be difficult to understand the context.
For instance, if I said I was going on a one-week holiday to Tunisia, you would think it a fairly inexpensive option, and that it would take about three hours to fly (from the UK), allowing five full days of holiday in Tunisia. My great grandmother Barbara went to Tunisia on holiday around 1900. To read more about Barbara click here for the previous article.
When searching through information about our ancestors, it is important to find out the context.
There is a big difference between my going to Tunis in 2023 and Barbara going in 1900, and it raises many questions.
Did Barbara go alone (which would have been unusual for an unmarried 27-year-old woman)? How did she pay for the trip, since she was from a relatively poor family, one of 16 children, living in a remote village in Scotland? I wonder if she went as a maid or companion to a rich family.
The journey itself would have been exhausting. First a ride in a horse-drawn carriage sixteen miles to the nearest station, then fifty miles by train to the city, then another train to London (397 miles), and yet another train to the coast (70 miles). Then a boat to France, a train through France (no high-speed trains at that time) to Marseille (554 miles), then an overnight ferry to Tunis. The journey would have taken at least 5-6 days, so you are adding 12 travel days to the holiday.
Sadly, while I can find out facts like how long it would have taken someone in 1910 to travel from Scotland to Tunis, the personal details, for instance how Barbara managed to make the trip at all, her stories of the trip, and how she met her future husband, are lost.
I encourage you to add context to your stories and captions, to help your ancestor hunters in the future. What may be obvious to you, may not be so obvious in future.
This looks like a bunch of heavy drinking folk. What is the context?
This photo shows me (Kate, second from right) with my pupils. Three weeks previously I had started to teach a computer course, about how to use a software programme in hospitals1. We all worked at Hewlett-Packard and the training was held in one of the French offices. Though the course was over three weeks, it was a lot of work. But I agreed that if we covered all the material in two weeks and four days, we could spend the last day wine tasting. Since we were staying near a French wine region, there was a lot of enthusiasm for the proposal. My students did work hard, so we took the last day off, and visited several vineyards. We did some tasting, bought some wine, and when we got back to our hotel, we did some more tasting! Dominique was our guide, as he was French and a wine connoisseur. It was a fun time.
I ran this training in 1996. I used an overhead projector for my slides. None of us had a mobile phone, computers were bulky, and neither personal computers nor laptops had been invented. Therefore I also had to teach my colleagues how to teach computer illiterate staff at a hospital how to use the computer, and how to type (not that we were very computer literate!).
In years to come one of my family may find this photo, and if it has no caption, context, or personal viewpoint, they will remark that it looked like a fun time and throw it away. By adding my story, they will learn a little more about my history, my personal perspective of the events in my life, and how life was different in 1996.
One day your lifetime will become ‘history’. Technology is moving so fast; you never know what in your life will be interesting to future generations. Write stories, add caption to photos, and help them understand the context of your life.
Our ten-year-old daughter (in 2015) wanted a mobile phone. Thinking she had a winning argument, she asked her father when he had got his first mobile phone, assuming that it would be when he was at least her age. “When I was 35” (in 1995) was the answer - which was not what she expected or wanted to hear2.
The software programme was called CareVue. It was used in Intensive Care Units, and it took all the data from the patient (temperature, blood pressure, ventilator settings, drugs etc.) and automatically updated a chart in the computer. This meant the data was gathered every minute (much more data than could be gathered by a nurse) giving much more information, it could be viewed in different places (for instance during a patient review in a conference room) and allow more time for the nurse to look after the patient.
Actually, my husband was an early mobile phone user, most of us did not get mobile phones until a few years later. Our daughter got her first mobile phone when she started to travel to school on her own, aged 12.
Great read, it really adds to the understanding of archive photos. Now I have some work to do! Thank you.
The story about your daughter asking her dad that question is funny.
And it makes me curious what it really means to archive, with or without context, in the current age. Most of us have ten million versions of ourselves on the Internet in some form, across different contexts, sometimes to the point of it all having no context anymore. We write and rewrite our bios, change our personal narratives by differently curating what we share. But most of that ends up belonging to someone else (Instagram or whoever owns the platform). So the need for that context is still there but in what form now and in the future?