In August 1944, as Allied troops approached the French capital, Parisians rose up and fought to liberate their city. Despite its secondary status in military terms, the Liberation of Paris became one of the founding myths of postwar France, sold in pictures at the cinema but above all in photographically illustrated books and pamphlets and at a photo exhibition at the Musée Carnavalet, Paris’s history museum. The fact that the Liberation was so extensively photographed presents a paradox: the sheer quantity of photos proved its importance as a historical event at the same time that their circulation helped construct it. Historians often use these images as illustrations for other arguments or windows onto what happened. This article looks closely at them to argue that photographers participated in the battle by forging links between those August days and Paris’s revolutionary history. Tracing their photographs’ circulation and exhibition reveals an investment in photography as a unique means of accessing and transmitting the emotionally rich history of the recent past. The article thus proposes a methodology for using photographs as primary sources that takes into account both their formal qualities and their history as material objects that circulate and act in the world.
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