I get the compulsion, especially for figures we don't often learn about, like women and particularly women in the global south. We don't have many graphic representations of these people and images are powerful... especially on social media.
But historic images communicate much more than an idea. They show us things about materials and craftsmanship. The things people wore meant something. These generated images give us inconsistent hallucinations about aesthetic and material pasts that never existed.
At the very same time you are learning about someone and some time and some place you didn't know before, you are learning lies about those people and those places and those times that it is very difficult to unlearn.
Disinformation about the present is fucking us in a massive scale. Disinformation about the past is many orders of magnitude more dangerous. The past is how we understand the present.
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