Summary of key points

• Images are essential sources of evidence about the past, much underated by historians.
  
  
• Images can reveal unique aspects of the past that texts cannot.
  
  
• Images come in many forms including photographs, paintings, cartoons, sketches, posters, postcards, illuminated addresses and engravings.
  
  
• Like any other evidence, historians can read images with a critical eye.
  
  
• Paintings are unique texts which give the historian valuable information (about material culture, what people wore, technology, what cities looked like); but they might also distort social reality as much as reflect it.
  
  
• The way artists distort reality is evidence of their personal identity, their ideologies and the mentalities and preoccupations of their age.
  
  
• Image-makers have a tendency to idealise and satirise the world they depict.
  
  
• Images can be more usefully and reliably read if they are part of a series or collection.
  
  
• What is absent from an image can be as important as what is depicted.
  
  
• Images can be read in multiple contexts: