Why Historical Photos and Artifacts Captivate Us: Expert Insights

There is something about a photograph from a hundred years ago, or an artifact from a thousand, that stops us cold. We look at it and feel the weight of time collapse. A Roman helmet. A child's orthopedic shoe from sixteenth-century Italy. A woman in 1890 standing on artificial legs, looking directly at the camera. These objects and images do something that words alone cannot: they make the past tangible.

Shravani Acharya, a historian and assistant professor at JSPM University, has spent her career thinking about why this happens. When we encounter historical photographs and artifacts, she explains, we are holding evidence. Not interpretation, not theory—evidence. "We can feel the history oozing through them," she says. A photograph captures not just what something looked like, but what it felt like to be alive in that moment. A picture of an engineer wiring an early IBM computer in 1958 tells us something no textbook can: this is what work looked like then. This is how people dressed. This is what they built with their hands.

What makes photographs particularly powerful is how recent they are as a technology, yet how completely they have reshaped our relationship to history. Before cameras, we had only written accounts, paintings, objects. Now we have images that seem to prove the past was real—that people wore these clothes, built these machines, lived these lives. Acharya notes that even a photograph from ten years ago functions as historical evidence. The distance between us and the past is not as vast as we imagine. The people in these pictures were human in the way we are human. They had concerns, hopes, small expectations of their lives.

But here is where the story becomes more complicated. Acharya is clear about something that many people prefer not to think about: no history is truly objective. The very act of choosing which photograph to preserve, which artifact to display, which story to tell—these choices are never neutral. They are shaped by who is doing the choosing. Colonial historians wrote about indigenous India through the lens of their own biases and curiosities. Nationalist historians rewrote those same stories to suit their own political moments. In the decades after independence, historians began writing from the perspectives of those who had been left out—women, the poor, the colonized. Each generation of historians has asked different questions because each generation has different needs.

This does not mean we should stop trying to be objective. It means we must be honest about the fact that objectivity is nearly impossible. If a historian cares deeply about women's voices in literature, she cannot be neutral when reading about their subjugation. The photographer who took a picture in 1938 of a roast corn vendor on Manhattan streets was making choices about what to frame, what to leave out, what to emphasize. We must question every image and artifact with this in mind. We must ask: who made this? What did they care about? What did they choose not to show us?

Acharya speaks with particular feeling about the Bhimbetka Caves in India, a UNESCO World Heritage Site with rock paintings from the Mesolithic, Paleolithic, and Neolithic periods. She stands in front of these paintings and thinks about the hands that made them. She does not know their names, their ages, whether they were men or women, what they loved or feared. They are frozen in history, remembered only for what they did, not who they were. This gap—between the trace and the person—haunts her work.

Yet Acharya also sees patterns in history that give her hope and concern in equal measure. Throughout time, empires have fallen not because of grand military defeats but because ordinary people stopped accepting their conditions. The common people—farmers, workers, the non-ruling class—ask for simple things: enough food, good infrastructure, resources to pass to the next generation. When those expectations go unmet, dissent spreads. It happened in France during the revolution. It happened across Asia and Africa during independence movements. It is happening now. Students, women, queer rights activists, and the working poor are uniting around shared grievances. The mythology of capitalism and individualism is fracturing.

This is why history matters, Acharya insists. Some people dismiss it as irrelevant, as the study of dead things. But forgetting history is how we forget how to be human. Without understanding what came before, we cannot build what comes next. We repeat the same mistakes. Our understanding of the world becomes narrow and hollow. The very fact that some people work hard to discourage the study of history is proof of why it is dangerous to ignore it.