© The Author(s) 2016 211
K.J. Archer, L.W. Oliverio, Jr. (eds.), Constructive
Pneumatological Hermeneutics in Pentecostal Christianity,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58561-5_13
CHAPTER 13
Vintage Photo, Visual Exegesis, and 1917
Interracial Pentecostalism: Hermeneutical
Devices and Historical Maneuvers
David D. Daniels III
D. D. Daniels III ()
McCormick Theological Seminary , Chicago , IL , USA
What can a historian learn from a vintage Pentecostal photograph?
What does a 1917 photograph of a forgotten era conceal? What might it
reveal? Slightly more than a decade after the advent of the Azusa Street
Revival, a jarring photograph is taken of a multiracial group of men who
were Pentecostal leaders in the Church of God in Christ. How best to
interpret this vintage photograph? Tzvetan Todorov, Bonnie Honig, and
Marion Grau offer a repertoire of hermeneutical tools and defi nitions to
interrogate an artifact like a photograph, the historical moment captured
or, to switch metaphors, frozen in time. In a sense, the historical moment
can never be released from its captivity or unfrozen; however, since a pho-
tograph is a form of writing with pictures rather than letters or words, it
can be deciphered; possibly, it can be read after the deciphering; the frag-
ments of the story that the photograph is or might be telling can be dis-
covered. Tzvetan Todorov and Bonnie Honig will be solicited to discern
or classify the kind of Pentecostal community that is captured by the inter-
racial Pentecostal photograph of 1917. This chapter interrogates historical
