Ralph Kinney Bennett opens The Vivid Centuries with a Chinese proverb:
The palest ink is better than the best memory.
His point:
In the first vivid century, the 20th, we had the benefit of the motion picture coming to full fruition along with sound recording. Movies, radio and television grew rapidly from the early-mid century onward, making it possible, even routine, to know much about the sights and sounds that were a part of our parents’ and grandparents’ lives.This was an important departure from the “silent centuries” that had gone before. These technologies have given us clues and more than clues with which to reconstruct the incidental ambience of daily life as far back as the early 1900s. They have put us in closer touch than ever before with social and cultural history at its most elemental and personal level.
The invention and perfection of photography in the mid 1800s made it a precursor to the vivid centuries. We know much of the mise en scene of our late 19th century ancestors’ lives — from the stark spareness of a prairie settler’s sod house to the opulence of a Victorian home because of this photography.