THE COLORS OF THE PAST

In their book, The Past is an Event, Laurent Olivier and Mireille Séguy asked this question: "What meaning can the past take for the present? from which we perceive it? » Vast question which allows a wide palette of responses. Peter Geimer, for his part, focused on attempts to recreate the past through images according to the following chronology: painting (in color), photography (in black and white) and then film (in motion). His essay on this recording of the past begins with the history painter (Meissonier) and panorama painting; the next chapter deals with photography, process which allows another possibility of disposing of time including stopping on image is the most bewitching; the last chapter deals with the film that comes add to this reservoir of images a capital innovation - the possibility of their to bring them back to life, to animate them. Thanks to a series of very well-documented case studies chosen, Geimer seizes images from the past as well as images that come from the past. He deconstructs the fallacious formula of “100% archives”, explains how certain actors provide images of the past to a society and above all warns us about the forms of visual testimony. The views historical photographs of Jerusalem that were taken from the abandoned sites of the biblical story, the last image of Robert Capa, the images presented in the 1995 exhibition on the crimes of the Wehrmacht during the Second World War World War or archive images used by artists - all these images are understood as autonomous forms of manifestations of history. But the appropriation of historical reality by means of the image depends clearly from what point in time we are looking at the past.