Abstract
"Historiophoty" was the term coined by Hayden White to describe the representation of history in visual images. Currently the term is used by historians to understand how films produce interpretations of the past. For theoretical and methodological purposes of historical practice it should identify the genesis of the concept in the writings of Hayden White. The visual seems to have been a minor issue in the work of White, though it was never absent and the concept of historiophoty is of a lineage of alternative concepts, such as "aural", "spectral", "phantasmagoria", which appear at different times in his writings. The aim of this paper is to show that the notions of "image" presented by White in his two major lineages: the verbal image, related to tropology and figures of speech and the nonverbal image, which is composed by the terms mentioned above. Our assumption is that White's theoretical effort in assembling his theory of tropes to explain the construction of the past in the historical text encountered a limit in visual images. To overcome this limit we propose a questioning of historiophoty as a tool for understanding the public use of visual figurations of the past in the historical culture of the industrial and post-industrial societies.