Today, the use of photographs in publications and exhibitions is commonplace, but this was not always so. This article shows how photographs of certain schools that have had lasting impact on design stand in ambiguous relationships to the buildings themselves. Photographs function as part of the design process; they record details of construction…

This paper has several concerns. It is about both the stories we tell and the images we place with those stories; it is also about historical practice and the power of the image to generate new research approaches. The paper is organized into three sections: the "eye of history" and historians and the visual archive; histories of black…