Visual history is the creation of historical narratives through the privileging of representations made by historical actors of their own lives. It is both an extension of documentary history, resting on textual sources, and an assertion that what we see matters at least as much, or more than, what we read. In the case of the history of refugees, displaced persons and migrants, visual material must be used, since so much of their trajectories are clandestine in character. When the story concerns wartime practices of internment and deportation, then both documentary and visual sources must be used in counterpoint. Some images are official and administrative in character. Others are self-reflexive.

This round table explores the insights we can gain from visual history as well as some of the traps it presents. Photographs and drawings or paintings have a vanishing point, an ordering of space even when no such order exists. What is outside the frame of the photo or print is always puzzling. And yet, we need to recognize the advantages of presenting the history of a group’s experience through the visual representations members of the group themselves created. The 2000 or so men and boys on the HMT Dunera refused to be defined by their incarceration and deportation from Britain. How they understood their fate while in custody and how they transcended it thereafter are the central questions we examine, against the backdrop of the images they themselves created or preserved.