It is a common experience of childhood in America. Teachers tell their class to wear dress clothes tomorrow because the photographer is coming to take the class picture. School photography was a regular source of income for local photography studios, a source of pride for schools, and a memento for students and their families. Most of these photographs did not withstand the tests of time — faded, lost, or thrown out with the rest of our childhood things. Others survived and found their way to local or state historical collections or historical archives. Often the only thing preserved in the process was the image itself, with little provenance or documentary material to understand the image (see, Figure 8 below, for an intriguing example). Occasionally entire studios with tens of thousands of negatives were donated to or purchased by state historical societies or museums. Advancing technology that includes digitized images, databases allowing fast search and retrieval, and the Internet for dissemination has spurred a secondary development as entire collections are being swept into ever more enormous virtual archives that are open to anyone with a personal computer and access on line. (Note 1)
        An article in the New York Times (November 29, 1998) entitled "Digitized Artifacts are Making Knowledge Available to All, on Line" suggests the scale of a new resource:

The Library of Congress, which has 117 million items in its archives, hopes to have four million items digitized and accessible on the World Wide Web by the turn of the century. The Denver Public Library expects to put 95,000 photographs of the old west on-line. California has linked 35 universities and museums into one on-line archive.

A Simulacra of History? Historical Photographs on the Internet

... not only are the pictures in archives often literally for sale, but their meanings are up for grabs....This semantic availability of pictures in archives exhibits the same abstract logic as that which characterizes goods on the marketplace.

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality... (p. 3)

The Hidden Curriculum in Black and White

In the Archives

White Students

Figure 1. "Soper school, Soper Post Office, North Dakota, 1896 G.G. Grimson, teacher; Mandus, Fred, Bernard Hultstrand" Typical of rural schools found in the Northern Great Plains Collection. Fred Hultstrand History in Pictures Collection, NDIRS-NDSU, Fargo. North Dakota State University Institute for Regional Studies PO Box 5599, Fargo, ND 58105-5599. American Memory, Library of Congress. (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

        Figure 1 reveals a number of possible meanings. The building in the background is visually less important than the people. There are forty-seven children; boys and girls are not casually mixed, nor were age groups. Everyone dressed for the portrait. Men and boys wore black or somber colors; all the males stand except for three older boys who were posed on horseback. Women and girls were wearing clothes that appear white in the black and white photograph but the hand-tinted copy shows dresses painted in pastel colors. A row of little girls was seated in front in a decorative and passive pose. Overall the people were arrayed in an open semi-circle facing the camera with younger and smaller pupils placed in front and older and larger students and teachers in back. The created image—very much in keeping with the model of the one room school—suggests the older protecting or shielding the younger.
        Interestingly the image is also one of equality in that the teachers and adults are standing among the students and not indicating superior status by clothes, body language or position. Despite the fact that a few of the children are barefooted, this is not highlighted as a marker of poverty (but see Figure 6). Images such as these, from Walton's Mountain to Little House on the Prairie, shape an American mythology of a bucolic golden age of schooling that inspires our periodic longing for a return to basics, simplicity, morality and so on.
        Everything is not quite what it seems. In the case of white immigrants, nationality and linguistic proficiency are invisible, but according to text at the Hultstrand web site, many of the children were recent immigrants speaking Swedish, German, Norwegian, etc. These meanings disappear in the photographs, as they disappeared in society where white immigrants became invisible through assimilation in a generation. It is important to note that all the people in the photograph are white, not because one would expect racial diversity in the territorial communities of the Northern Great Plains but because "whiteness" is precisely part of the taken for granted quality of the American Common School. (Note 8) It was lucky that the Northern Great Plains collection preserved these particular images, but in doing so the images of specific schools begin to pass over into an archetype of the one-room school. Photos like this raise a question: where were the others? Did the African American, Native American, and Asian communities that existed at that same historical moment in the South, the Northeast, or on the West Coast also educate their children in one-room schools? What did they look like? What kind of historical or cultural amnesia accounts for the fact that these photos are not present in the American memory collection or National Archives? In fact without substantial historical research we do not know if the photos and not present, because they were not made (or not made in the same volume), because they were not preserved, or because they were not archived
        Figure 2 is one of more than sixty images from the Detroit Publishing Collection depicting urban high schools. The picture was selected because of the children; most of the other views of urban high schools show buildings only. Despite the rather grandiose title: "Touring Turn-of-the-Century America," images in this collection were not created as an overview of the nation. These views, as they were thought of, were made by professional photographers to be reproduced as postcards — that is, they had to sell. Other than date and location there was little documentation. The collection site describes it this way:

The Detroit Photographic Company was launched as a photographic publishing firm in the late 1890s by Detroit businessman and publisher William A. Livingstone, Jr., and photographer and photo-publisher Edwin H. Husher. They obtained the exclusive rights to use the Swiss "Photochrom" process for converting black-and-white photographs into color images and printing them by photolithography. This process permitted the mass production of color postcards, prints, and albums for sale to the American market.

Figure 2. High school, Hancock, Mich. C. 1906 Detroit Publishing Co. American Memory, Library of Congress. (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

A large mass of students stand in front of an imposing stone building. While apparently called out of school for the photograph, the students seem to be casually milling around and much less orderly than in the rural school. No teachers or adults are in evidence; neither was an attempt made to arrange the students by size. Here too the students are all white but more homogeneous in age than in the prairie school. The images of shelter and protection are completely missing; in fact, students in the street and lounging against a telephone pole suggest urban toughness and self-sufficiency. Overall this is a photograph of a school; the building was emphasized over the students who form a faceless mass. Comprehensive high schools like this were expensive public works that were sources of civic pride. The high school views were perhaps similar to the mental institution and asylum photos discussed by Bogdan and Marshall (1997) who observed that:

The initial impression the postcard pictures leave is that these institutions were orderly and therapeutic environments. One way to understand the cards is that they were part of the visual rhetoric of hegemony — they helped manage the public's understanding of the legitimacy of professional control of deviance. (p. 5)

Figure 3. "School Girls" created between 1900 and 1905. Detroit Publishing Co. American Memory, Library of Congress. (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

Figures 3 and 4 provide additional insight into the ways in which school and children were imagined at the turn of the century. The two shots were made in the same doorway, presumably the same day. The photographer has used the steps as risers and the doorway as an ornate frame, carefully posing the children to create images of order and obedience. White children are dressed in white, a symbol of innocence and purity. The imposing door, itself a metaphor for the doorway to knowledge, is forbidding. Knowledge is not depicted as an open process of personal growth or something gained in family and community. It is the property of the awe inspiring institution behind the children through which they must pass. The children are ready for the challenge. They stand at attention, equidistant, not quite touching, the girls in bonnets and white dresses the boys in what appear to be uniforms with short pants, leggings, shirts and caps.

Figure 4. "School Boys" created between 1900 and 1905. Note says "Students holding swords at their sides." Detroit Publishing Co. American Memory, Library of Congress. (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

The caption informs us that the little boys have swords at their sides. This is a particularly telling example of the ways in which gendering, one of the strong elements of the hidden curriculum, and school discipline, one of the weak elements, were represented on film.
        Even though nearly all of the thousands of photographs of schools in these collections are photographs of white students and teachers, they were not identified as such. Figure 5 is particularly interesting because of its caption which identifies children of white migrant workers. In the United States "white" is the taken-for- granted category. White has been the color of invisibility, the norm, the regular and average (Frankenburg 1993). There are no hits in either "American Memory" or the National Archives site for "white students" or "white teachers." "White schools" produced a single hit from "American Memory," a 1938 Marion Post Wolcott photo of a dark school building with the caption "'White school house, Chaplin, Scotts Run, West Virginia." The National Archive site produced three hits on white school. One was a "Sunday School Indians and Whites" Indian Territory (Oklahoma) 1910. The other two were segregated schools. One photograph from 1941 is a picture of a building with the following caption: "Harmony Community, Putnam County, Georgia.... The Harmony white school was closed down for several years because there were not enough children to make its continued operation worthwhile. Two years ago it was reopened, and last year it had an enrollment of 11, three of whom were from outside the Community. The few high school age children in Harmony go to Eatonton in a bus operated by the County—but no transportation is furnished for children of grade school."

Figure 5. A school for the children of white migrant farm workers is maintained at the Osceola Farm Labor Supply Center operated by the Office of Labor, War Food Administration. This is the second grade, taught by Mrs. Emma Greenwood. Department of Agriculture. Office of Information. Photographer, Osborne 3/1945. (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

I reproduced the other as Figure 5. "Whites" are only identified as such in opposition to people of color, whereas people of color always have their ethnicity attached as a marker and identifier.

African American Students

Figure 6. "Four black children in yard" from the Detroit Publishing Collection. Created between 1890 and 1910. American Memory, Library of Congress. (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

The tableau of clapboard house and fence with clothes thrown over emphasizes their poverty. Photographic postcards of African Americans, produced for white audiences, were not as overtly racist as the popular cartoon cards of alligators, pickaninnies, and mammies (Turner 1994; Mellinger 1992). Still, Figure 6 is a clear example of what Turner termed "contemptible collectibles," postcards produced for white consumers that conformed to certain racialized stereotypes: Black children were frequently photographed outside dressed in rags and tatters. As Turner (1994, p. 16) observed: "Picture postcards featuring poorly dressed little black children romping in cotton fields suggests that if they had been given a choice, they would have chosen to spend their days in the field rather than in the schoolroom." Images of diligence, order, and innocence were never included.

Figure 7. Spring 1939. "Primary class in new school, Prairie Farms, Montgomery, Alabama" Marion Post Wolcott, photographer. Still Picture Branch (NWDNS), National Archives. (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

        The job of Farm Security Administration photographers was shifting from the focus on depression misery to an emphasis on America's strength and resiliency. By the 1930's, advancing photographic technology made it easier to take photographs inside, and the image Post-Wolcott made shows African American students seated reading at a table with their African American teacher standing over helping a student. The class is small with books and tables and chairs instead of rows of student desks. Boys and girls seem to be working together, perhaps reading. The choice of a new and apparently well-equipped but segregated school creates an affirming vision of Black America as "separate but equal." The photograph similarly creates an image of teaching as an active and caring activity. Other images in Post Wolcott's proof sheet include playing basketball and volleyball in which the teacher also takes an active role.
        A better source for historic photographs of African Americans in school is the Schomburg collection of the New York Public Library. The Schomburg offers a searchable archive of 19th Century images of African Americans. A search of the "education" category produced fifty images. The earliest of these are wood block engravings made for Harper's Weekly and published in the 1870's.

Figure 8. "Class of school children posing outside with their teacher, Espy, Pa. Spring 1912. Thomas 8, Eleanor 7, donor: Eleanor Drayton," Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

They show "freedom schools" for emancipated slaves. There are a number of photos of famous educators, Booker T. Washington, for example, and there are many photographs from the historical black colleges: Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute. Figure 8 is unique in depicting what is apparently an integrated school class in Pennsylvania in 1912. It is one of those important images that appear in historic collections with inadequate captions and provenance. The caption identifies the photo as a gift to the Schomburg by Eleanor Drayton, and we might assume that she is the Eleanor age seven in the photo. Other meanings are more problematic. Thirty students including Whites, Blacks and apparently Non-White ethnics (Native Americans? Eastern European immigrants?) were clustered together shoulder-to-shoulder on a bleacher with the African American teacher standing on the left with her arm symbolically embracing the entire class. The students probably dressed for the photograph. They do not seem sorted by race or gender. This is the clearest image of equality and diversity that I found in any of the collections searched. A good deal of research would be necessary to discover whether integrated classes were common in Espy, Pennsylvania in 1912, or if the Anglo-appearing students were immigrants whose "otherness" set them apart as well.

Figure 9. Taos County, New Mexico. Children play in the Peñasco schoolyard. Photographer, Irving Rusinow, December 1941 Department of Agriculture. Bureau of Agricultural Economics. Still Picture Branch (NWDNS), National Archives. (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

        In Figure 9, a long low adobe school building stands against a line of arid mountains in the background marking the geography as the Southwest and establishing a Spanish feel. The students are clearly aware of the camera; some appear to have been posed in a circle holding hands, others are wandering around as if at recess. Overall this is not an image of order like Figures 3 and 4, or of the specific relations of teaching and caring evidenced in Figures 7 and 8. In place of order, book learning or scholarship, we see playfulness. A Dominican nun approaches the circle from the right, but she is not working with or embracing the students. The image is especially interesting because of the caption: "School was built by the Catholic Church, then deeded over to the State, and most of the teachers are Catholic Sisters, though this is a public school. Sisters' salaries are paid by the State directly to the Church. Though religious teaching does not take place during the regular school period, the Sisters "naturally express the Catholic way of life, and by association with them the children cannot but receive some of the religious essence." (Father Morgan)

Figure 10. Taos County, New Mexico. Home Economics class at Peñasco High School make toys for Christmas. Photographer, Irving Rusinow December, 1941. Department of Agriculture. Bureau of Agricultural Economics. Still Picture Branch (NWDNS), National Archives. (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

Figure 10, depicting a class of older female students in a home economics class, is a familiar image of women's traditional gender roles. The young women are apparently making clothes for dolls as Christmas presents. Sex segregated home economics classes are a form of vocational education, preparing Mexican-American girls to be domestics and mothers. (Note 11) Similar pictures were made regularly at the Indian boarding schools showing Indian girls using sewing machines or cooking.

Native American Students

Figure 11. Mt. Pleasant Indian Industrial School c. 1910 Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991. American Memory, Library of Congress (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

The image of the "industrial school" belies its name by presenting a peaceable view of grounds including a formal pond and young girls holding hands ("Ring-a- ring-a-roses, A pocket full of posies"). While clearly we are looking at an institution, nothing in the image tells us that Mount Pleasant was an "Indian" school. The pastoral scene, manufactured by architecture, costume, gendering and photography, suggests gentility and civilization without any hint of the struggle for the hearts and minds of Indian children: removed from family and community; locked in this institutional compound; sent to boarding school to become White.
        Indians were subjected to forced regimes of acculturation/assimilation unique in American history. Students were taken far from their parents and community, had their hair cut, were required to wear Euro-American dress and forbidden to speak their mother tongue. Alongside quasi-military discipline, cultural "re-education," and cleverly articulated attempts at cultural genocide to "Kill the Indian and save the man," Indian schools provided vocational training, art and music education, and sports. (Note 12) These were well-funded federal institutions with a coherent curriculum. Compare the Indian school movement, for example, with the treatment of African Americans who were denied schooling in the South until the end of slavery. Although some northern abolitionist women teachers opened "freedom schools" for freed slaves, there was no federal program to provide education to emancipated Blacks. Instead, southern states rights imposed the jim crow system of segregated schools, and northern urban school districts were segregated "de facto" by housing practices and gerrymandered districts. The legacies both of the Indian boarding schools and of segregation have yet to be overcome.

Figure 12. Very early class of young boys with flags at the Albuquerque Indian School. c.1895 National Archives and Record Center. Still Picture Branch (NWDNS), National Archives. (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

Uniforms were part of the original concept for Indian schools: Captain Richard Pratt who originated the concept, dressed the losers in uniforms similar to the cavalry that defeated them, and then regimented them like soldiers (PBS Video, 1991). In the photo, uniforms submerge individuality and produce an image of both conformity and interchangeable parts; moreover, they accomplish what Goffman (1976, p. 32) termed "function ranking" removing any ambiguity or status inconsistency. They also serve to strip the children of their native identity. (Note 13) The woman's lack of uniform makes her the only individual and sets her apart. Taller than any of the children, eyes fixed firmly on the lens, the woman holds her arms stiffly at her side. In the midst of a group she stands alone, not touching any of the students. Her position is quite different from the teachers in Figure 1, who stand among the students but to the side and are depicted on the same level; or Figure 7 where the teacher seems to make a gesture of inclusion; or Figure 8 where the teacher is symbolically lowering herself to the students' level. The caption material in the Archive reads: "This is one of a small collection of photographs of the Albuquerque Indian School, which was established in 1881 to provide off-reservation industrial training to the Indians of the Southwest. By 1912, the school had 8 primary grades and over 300 students; by 1925 enrollment increased to over 800 students and grades 11 and 12 were added. The Albuquerque Indian School continued operating until 1982, when its program was transferred to the Santa Fe Indian School."

Asian Students

Figure 13. "Chinese Subjects" Photograph by Wm Henry Jackson c. 1901. No location given. American Memory, Library of Congress. Detroit Publishing Co. American Memory, Library of Congress. (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

He made a number of exposures of the same family, but he left no firm date, location, or discussion of the occasion for the shoot. (Note 14) I find these photographs similar to the Detroit collection's images of Blacks: they share the stereotyping feel of photographs of the exotic "other." The first segregated school for Chinese students was opened in San Francisco in 1885, and rigid segregation was enforced until 1905 when the board of education allowed Chinese students into a regular city high school. In 1906 a separate school in San Francisco was established for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese children (Spring 1997, p. 76). Perhaps photographs of these schools can be found in California.
        No photographs of Japanese children appear in either American Memory or the National Archives collections before 1941, when a slew of photographs were made to document the relocation procedure. Dorothea Lange and other Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers were now working under the auspices of the Office of War Information (OWI) and completed assignments to show Japanese students in California schools and orphanages on the eve of relocation. This was followed by a long term campaign to document the internment camps, including many images showing Japanese children in school in Tule, Manzanar, Salt River and the other sites. Figures 14 and 15 are representative of these efforts. Figure 14 was made by Dorothea Lange at an integrated San Francisco public school with large numbers of Japanese students.

Figure 14. "San Fransisco, California. Flag of allegiance pledge at Raphael Weill Public School, Geary and Buchanan Streets. Children in families of Japanese ancestry were evacuated with their parents and will be housed for the duration in War Relocation Authority centers where facilities will be provided for them to continue their education." 04/20/1942 Department of the Interior. War Relocation Authority. Photographer, Dorothea Lange. Still Picture Branch (NWDNS), National Archives. (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

The occasion was the rounding up of Japanese families so that they could be shipped to relocation camps. The choice of patriotic images, saluting the flag, clearly advanced a view of Japanese as patriotic and law-abiding Americans. Figure 15, also by Lange, shows a school class in Manzanar. Students with what appears to be a Japanese teacher are hard at work reading and writing. They have the same sort of modern desks and chairs that can be seen in Figure 7. The hidden curriculum portrayed in the relocation photographs is an unabashed patriotism illustrative of school's role in the direct reproduction of ideological belief systems. As the captions indicate, these are a class of photographs taken not to showcase school children but demonstrate to the world that the United States relocation camps for Japanese citizens were much different from concentration or POW camps. They featured images of well-equipped schools, caring teachers, and happy willing students.

Figure 15. "Manzanar Relocation Center, Manzanar, California. These young evacuees are attending the first elementary school at this War Relocation Authority center. There are six grades with volunteer teachers and voluntary attendance." 07/01/1942 Department of the Interior. War Relocation Authority. Photographer, Dorothea Lange. Still Picture Branch (NWDNS), National Archives. (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

        There is another hole in the American Memory. Children with disabilities were as invisible as children of color. Based on my survey of these two mega-archives, America's photographic images of schools, and the historical memories they engender, consist nearly entirely of able- bodied white children and teachers. A search for deaf schools retrieved a single Detroit Publishing view of the outside of the "Deaf and Dumb School, Columbus, Ohio." This was a familiar institutional view with no persons present. The search also retrieved and a number of potential ("not yet digitized") photos of deaf and dumb schools from the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record. These too are likely to be photographs of architecture. Figure 16 from the National Archives is the only photograph found in either site depicting crippled, deaf or blind children in school. It is interesting that this photograph was attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt who was himself crippled by polio.

Figure 16. WPA, "Blind children at work in Art Center Workshop in Salem, Oregon." Creating Indiv. Roosevelt, Franklin D. Federal Arts Project; Works Progress Administration; 1941. Still Picture Branch (NWDNS), National Archives. (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

Discussion

Notes

1. There are sixteen images included in this article and most of them are photographs of classes although they were not all examples of school photography Three were produced by a professional photography company to be reproduced as postcards (Figures 2, 3 and 4). Eight of the photographs were made by various government documentary projects (Figures 5, 7, 9, 10, 14, 15, and 16). Two of the images (Figures 11 and 12) were part of the ongoing photographic documentation of the federally financed Indian boarding schools. Two of the images were not school photographs at all, but an attempt to find photographs of children of color who did not appear in any of the class pictures: Figure 6 was made as a postcard and shows four African American children and Figure 13 is a William Henry Jackson photograph of Chinese children. Figure 8 depicting an integrated class in Pennsylvania in 1912 appears to be a school photograph, but has little provenance to clearly identify its genre.
2. For a useful review of some of the issues of searching for photographic images see Steiner, Kathy "Finding Photographs."
3. "The most thorough audience appraisal resulted from an end-user evaluation conducted in 1992-1993. Forty-four school, college and university, and state and public libraries were provided with a dozen American Memory collections on CD-ROMs and videodisks. Participating library staff, teachers, students and the public were polled about which digitized materials they had used and how well the delivery systems worked. The evaluation indicated continued interest by institutions of higher education as well as public libraries. The surprising finding, however, was the strong showing of enthusiasm in schools, especially at the secondary level." American Memory pilot—seed of a universally available Library http://lcweb.loc.gov/ndl/nov-dec.html#pilot
4. Where historians and social scientists have typically used photographs to illustrate reconstructions of the past that are entirely language based, I have advocated the use of photographs as primary source material. For many years I have been collecting, paying attention to, and thinking about American historical photographs. This work was expensive to undertake and extremely labor intensive. It required traveling to libraries, museums and photograph collections and obtaining permission to make copies -- using a film camera and copy stand to photograph each image. Much of this work was part of a study of coal miners for which approximately 12,000 historic photos were collected from archives all over the country (Margolis, 1988; 1994; 1998). Cataloging, studying and working with a collection that by necessity included slides, prints, and negatives all associated with data about captions and provenance has been a very slow and inefficient process. This process is rapidly becoming as obsolete as the card catalog, handwritten note card, and carbon paper. In a few minutes once can visit a web site, search thousands of images by keyword, download the images one is interested in and paste them into your document.
5. Many critics of the image have drawn attention to problems inherent in photography and the creation of a mass culture "image world:" cf. Adorno and Horkheimer 1973), Baudrilliard (1983), Rossler (1990), Sekula (1990), and, Solomon-Godeau (1991).
6. An anonymous reviewer correctly pointed out the reflexive confirmation of this quality of the image with the observation that: "One possible 'antithetical' use, of course, is the sort that occurs in this article: critical social analysis of pictures not made with this purpose in mind."
7. People have misconstrued Durkheim's notion of "collective consciousness" to mean some kind of group mind. But this is inaccurate. The engendering of collective consciousness is both an abstract and theoretical lesson and a practical activity. It is represented in collective action and in schools, libraries, museums, repositories, and now the Internet: "Society is not the work of the individuals that compose it at a given stage of history, nor is it a given place. It is a complex of ideas and sentiments, of ways of seeing and feeling, a certain intellectual and moral framework distinctive of the entire group. Society is above all a consciousness of the whole. It is therefore, this collective consciousness that we must instill in the child" (Durkheim, [1925]1961:277).
8. Many scholars have been working to make whiteness into a visible category. See Frankenberg, 1993 for one of the pioneering analyses of whiteness.
9. The site described it this way: "This Special Presentation of the Library of Congress exhibition, The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, showcases the Library's incomparable African American collections. The presentation is not only a highlight of what is on view in this major black history exhibition, but also a glimpse into the Library's vast African American collection. Both include a wide array of important and rare books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings. This presentation is not yet searchable."
10. I actually have seen many photographs dating from the turn of the century or before that show Mexican and Spanish American children in school. Such photographs can be found in nearly every state historical society, local history museum and library in the Southwest. As is no doubt the case with the other racial/ethnic groups it is not the absolute lack of photographs that is problematic. It is the curious selection process that has produced the simulacrum of "National Archives" or "American Memory" that is the issue. Moreover, the problem that is so obvious in photographs of school is no doubt present in many other categories.
11. As Mary Romero pointed out: "The 'cult of domesticity' advocated sex roles that were not really applicable to working-class Mexican Americans whose economic circumstances did not allow the maintenance of gender-specific spheres of activity—that is, women in the private sphere of the home and men in the public sphere of production and trade." Programs such as this did, however, produce trained and "Americanized" domestic workers to work for nearby Anglo families (Romero,1992, p. 81-82).
12. These were the words of Captain Richard Pratt who established the Carlisle Indian School. He believed in subjecting Native American youth to quasi-military discipline: uniforms and drill exercises alongside instruction in English and industrial training. (Cf. PBS Video: In The White Man's Image, 1991).
13. This is equally true for the children posed in Figures 3 and 4. Uniformed students are the perfect images of "product" for the industrial-efficiency model of schooling that was the hallmark of late 19th early 20th century education.
14. In one of the shots there is a sign and the caption: "On tablet (translated from Chinese): Today we are the owners of money, yesterday we were the owners of the territory" which may suggest the occasion for the shoot.
15. The technique of using photographs taken over time to examine social change was pioneered by Mark Klett and given a more sociological interpretation by Jon Rieger (Klett et al, 1984; Klett 1991; Rieger, 1996;)
16. Such research might provide important information for the interpretation of Figure 7, for example.
17. Semiotics, the science of signs, has developed a complex and highly technical language that can be useful in the interpretation of photographic images. Images and texts are analyzed along multiple dimensions described as Indexical (pointing), Iconic (representative) and Symbolic (cultural) meanings. Serious students might consult the works of Ferdinand de Saussure, Umberto Eco or Roland Barthes. These analytic tools of semiology can also be employed in the construction of images designed to produce certain impacts. See for example: Nadin, Zakia, and Nadin, (1995

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