About the Project
Through the Visual History web portal, the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF) operates a communication and information platform that provides current insights into the community of historical image research and aims to raise awareness among the general public interested in history regarding the unique nature of visual evidence as part of cultural heritage.
Through a variety of post formats, the weekly updated blog presents central concepts and research fields while taking a closer look at the actors within the image industry. The blog complies information on conferences, exhibitions, and relevant new publications, and features a wide range of articles on the field of research. A particular focus of the portal is the presentation of current research projects. Interdisciplinary collaboration with academic disciplines that traditionally work with visual sources—art history, media studies, cultural studies—is explicitly encouraged.
The online portal Visual History was launched in late 2013 to accompany the collaborative project Visual History: Institutions and Media of Pictorial Memory. This joint research project involving the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam (Prof. Dr. Annette Vowinckel and Dr. Jürgen Danyel), the Herder Institute in Marburg (Prof. Dr. Peter Haslinger), the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig (Prof. Dr. Simone Lässig), and the Deutsches Museum in Munich (Dr. Wilhelm Füßl) was funded from 2012 to 2016 as part of the Leibniz Association’s competitive funding process.
As part of the project, a book series was launched by Wallstein Verlag:
Visual History: Images and Pictorial Practices in History, edited by Jürgen Danyel, Gerhard Paul, and Annette Vowinckel
Conference poster “Visual History: Concepts, Research Fields and Perspectives” for the conclusion of the project, March 2016 in Berlin. A team from the Hungarian television station MTV at the construction site of a power plant near the Danube. Photographer: Tamás Urbán, Hungary 1971 © Fortepan / Tamás Urbán