Photo Library

The question of the (photographic) construction and representation of national identity is not limited to the ‘long 19th century’, but is a current issue in the post-colonial, post-global, digital world. The essays by international contributors aim at studying the relationship between photographic archives and the idea of nation, yet without focusing on single symbolic icons and instead considering the wider archival and sedimental dimension.

The Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut wishes to generate a greater understanding of the inescapable value of photographs and analogue archives for the future of studies in historic, human and social sciences.

Only integration between the analogue format and the digital format can guarantee the correct conservation of the photographic heritage for future studies and at the same time the implementation of digital instruments.

Representatives of both the photographic collections and academic research are therefore called on to support and respect the Florence Declaration.

Le due giornate di studio, che si svolgeranno rispettivamente a Firenze e a Bologna, intendono analizzare le dinamiche del mercato dell'arte in Italia all'inizio del Novecento intersecando i metodi della storia dell'arte, della storia economica, della sociologia. In questo fecondo contesto di ricerca verranno approfonditi due aspetti particolari: il rapporto fra pratiche fotografiche e pratiche antiquarie, oggetto della prima giornata ospitata dalla Fototeca del Kunsthistorisches Institut, e il mondo antiquariale nella Roma sabauda, che verrà studiato nella seconda giornata alla Fondazione Federico Zeri. L'attenzione di queste istituzioni per i temi trattati scaturisce non solo da un interesse scientifico, ma anche dalla realtà materiale dei propri fondi fotografici e archivistici.

The lucrative career of the Florentine dealer Stefano Bardini (1836-1922), the development of the medium of photography as a technology, and the global expansion of the art market out of Italy were cotemporaneous.  From the 1860s until his death, Bardini relied heavily upon photographs to transact art and this business practice would be continued by his son Ugo until 1965.  Hundreds of receipts from local photographers—Brogi, Montabone, & Alinari among them—as well as thousands of photographs and negatives testify to the critical role of photographs in the assessment, acquisition, marketing and sale of thousands of objects of fine and decorative art.  Moreover, Bardini’s predilection for installation and display would carry over to his classification and arrangement of the photographs.  Within my larger project concerning the state archive of the Bardini business, I have been captivated by the archaeology of its photo archive.  This paper proposes to illustrate the gradual evolution of the use of the material photograph as active tools of the trade—from single image to their classification and migration to inventory photo albums, to montage for planning exhibition installations and for layout preparation for auction catalogues.  Far from static, many of these images would live another life, printed in auction catalogues and scholarly publications; in turn, Bardini would cut the images from print, annotate them with buyer and price or journal citation, and reintroduce them into their respective album or fascicolo.  Owing to the enormous object inventory that passed from father to son, Ugo had no need to acquire more stock.  Thus, for him, the photographs took on a different purpose.  Ugo reused them and augmented the collection, categorized by genre or by artist, thereby composing a veritable Memory Atlas  which represent a hundred years of the art market, illustrated.

In the last few years international research on the art market has gained in intensity, inspiring a host interdisciplinary studies and conferences while successfully defining a new field of academic research and teaching. Through a range of gatherings and publications, the dynamics of the antiques market have been explored at the intersections of art history, economics, and sociology, among other disciplines. At the center of the most recent studies are the networks of relations between antiquarians, collectors, and other persons connected to the selling of art works. Within these networks, photographers have been identified as key actors in the evolution of the art trade from the second half of the 19th century. The art market shapes and informs the art historical canon, and as indispensable agents of the art market's exchanges, photographs are now also recognized as essential to the formation of the canon. At the same time, the "material turn" in the humanities has refocused attention upon both the itineraries of the art objects and the functions and circulation of individual photographs. Over the course of two study days, we will enter into this rich discussion by concentrating upon two of its aspects in particular: the relations between photographic and antiquarian practices, on which the first day at the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz will focus, and the world of art trade in Savoia Rome, which will be addressed on the second day at the Fondazione Federico Zeri in Bologna. The attention of both institutions to these topics derives not only from a scientific interest but also from the material reality of their extensive photographic and archival holdings.

Unboxing Photographs: Working in the Photo Archive *

An exhibition of the joint research project "Photo Objects – Photographs as Objects (of Research) in Archaeology, Ethnology and Art History", Kunstbibliothek Berlin, 16 February – 27 May 2018 *

Partner: Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut; Institut für Europäische Ethnologie der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Photographic Collection of the Kunstbibliothek and Antikensammlung at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin *

"Unboxing Photographs: Working in the Photo Archive" opens the boxes of four photo archives to showcase the material diversity of photographs as three-dimensional objects: from glass plate negatives, to 35 mm film, to prints on albumin or silver gelatin paper. These photo-objects are taken in the hand, tilted and turned over, labeled, cut down, framed, glued into albums, printed, and dispatched or posted online. Contact and inventory sheets, cardboard mounts, card catalogs, and today even display screens are integral parts of the photo-object, or even constitute it. Since the 19th century, archaeologists, ethnologists, and art historians have worked with photographs and assembled them in archives. There, they are processed and ordered – and only through such treatment do they become usable as documents for scholarly research. These procedures alter the physical properties of photographs and leave behind material traces. Photographs, hence, are neither objective nor timeless. By taking them seriously as objects, and not just as pictures, it becomes possible to tell their multifarious stories. The exhibition interrogates the commonly practiced and disciplinary conventions that govern the perception and presentation of photographs – for example museum display using passepartouts – and tries out new design possibilities. Work with photo-objects is also central to the artistic interventions of JUTOJO, Ola Kolehmainen, Joachim Schmid, Elisabeth Tonnard, and Akram Zaatari, all of which have been integrated into the exhibition. *

Curatorial Concept: Julia Bärnighausen, Costanza Caraffa, Stefanie Klamm, Franka Schneider, Petra Wodtke *
 
This exhibition is sponsored by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research. Other exhibition sponsors are: the Schering Stiftung, and the Verein der Freunde der Antike auf der Museumsinsel Berlin e.V.

Edited by Hana Buddeus, Vojtěch Lahoda and Katarína Mašterová.

Together with the digitisation of collections and the redefining of analogue archives, there has emerged a broad spectrum of new topics dealing with the fascinating subject matter of photography of art works. This results in unprecedented attention being paid to the various kinds of photographs housed in the photo libraries of art history institutions, the estates of art historians, artists and photographers, archives, museums or galleries, and reproduced in periodicals and publications on art history.

Published in honor of Josef Sudek (1896–1976), a Czech photographer otherwise famous for his photographs of the misty window of his studio, the present book brings together experts on the photography of art works from leading European and American institutions as well as curators and art historians who specialise on Sudek and his work. The breadth of the scope of this photographer, for whom making reproductions of fine art was a source of livelihood, helps to open up a number of important questions which explore various problems related to the photographic representation of art.

INTRODUCTION
1. REPRODUCING ART’S HISTORY
“The Life of Objects”: Sculpture as Subject and Object of the Camera’s Lens – Geraldine A. Johnson
Josef Sudek and the Photography of Works of Art – his Predecessors and Contemporaries – Jan Mlčoch
Sudek’s Revelations – Antonín Dufek
2. FROM SOUVENIR TO ARCHIVE DOCUMENT
Rodin and his Marble Sculptures: A Photographic Passion Hélène Pinet
Manzoni in the Photothek. Photographic Archives as Ecosystems – Costanza Caraffa
The Ambivalent Power of Reproduction: Josef Sudek’s Postcards –Amy Hughes
3. SCULPTURE AS PHOTOGENIC BODY
The Photographic Detail and Sculptural Seeing – Sarah Hamill
Braun, Brokof, Sudek et al.: Czech Baroque Sculpture in the Light of Modernist Photography – Hana Buddeus
Modern Sculpture, A Photobook – Megan R. Luke
4. ARTISTS IN THE ROLE OF CLIENTS
Photographer and Painter: Josef Sudek and the Mystery of the Image – Vojtěch Lahoda
Volume, Material and “Something Else”: Sudek as Engaged Observer of a Turning Point in Modern Czech Sculpture– Katarína Mašterová
There Appeared to Be Chaos: Josef Sudek’s Work in the Context of Avant-Garde Architectural Photography in the 1920s and 1930s – Rolf Sachsse
The Poetics of Geometry: Josef Sudek as a Photographer of Modern Architecture – Mariana Kubištová
CONTRIBUTORS
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

The archive has become an object of sustained historical and theoretical investigation in recent years. The anthropological turn in photographic criticism has opened up new directions for the analysis and understanding of photo archives that compliment and dialogue with more traditional Art Historical approaches focused on photographs as images; it has helped direct this growing interest towards the materiality of the photograph as object, and its social and institutional lives that unfold very often within the archival ecosystem. At the same time, an ever-increasing number of scholars, artists and curators are addressing the neglected histories and practices of photography beyond the borders of Europe and North America. This conference aims to build upon these developments and reorientations, and to attend to issues of critical importance for photo archives from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Oceania—from the part of the world that Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam has so aptly referred to as the “majority world.” The conference will be the seventh in the series “Photo Archives,” a series that helped over a number of years to establish an international network of photo archive scholars and archive professionals, and to stimulate a dialogue between academics and archivists.

Edited by Julia Bärnighausen, Costanza Caraffa, Stefanie Klamm, Franka Schneider, and Petra Wodtke

Photographs are not simply images but also historically shaped three-dimensional objects. They hold a physical presence, bear traces of handling and use, and circulate in social, political and institutional networks. Beyond their visual content, they are increasingly acknowledged as material "actors," not only indexically representing the objects they depict, but also playing a crucial role in the processes of knowledge-making within scientific practices. This has a historical dimension: most scientific disciplines rapidly adopted photography as an important research tool. Thereby, the various material qualities of photographs afforded certain types of uses in those disciplines. Specialized photo archives were founded as interfaces of technology and science and as laboratories for scientific thought.
This book highlights some recent approaches to photo-objects and photo archives as parts of a dynamic and material system of knowledge. Taking photographic materiality as its premise, it analyzes the epistemological potential of analog and digital photographs and photo archives in the humanities and sciences. Issues range from the circulation and distribution of photographs, the construction of disciplinary methods through the handling and use of photographs, the formation and transformation of a canon by photography and respective hierarchies of value, to the arrangement, classification and working processes in photo archives and other institutions.

With papers by Zeynep Çelik, Idil Çetin, Lorraine Daston, Elizabeth Edwards, Haidy Geismar, Lena Holbein, Pip Laurenson, Maria Männig, Anaïs Mauuarin, Suryanandini Narain, Omar W. Nasim, Christopher Pinney, Christina Riggs, Joan M. Schwartz, Katharina Sykora, Petra Trnková, Kelley Wilder

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Edition Open Access 2019
Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge. Studies 12
ISBN 978-¬3-¬945561-¬39-¬3
e-¬ISBN [PDF] 978¬-3¬-945561¬-40-¬9
e¬-ISBN [EPUB] 978¬-3-¬945561¬-41-¬6

Herausgegeben von Julia Bärnighausen, Costanza Caraffa, Stefanie Klamm, Franka Schneider und Petra Wodtke

Fotografien sind nicht nur Bilder, sondern dreidimensionale materielle Objekte, die in die Hand genommen, gedreht und gewendet werden können. Im Laufe ihrer Existenz werden sie beschriftet, gestempelt, beschnitten und anderweitig bearbeitet – vor und nach ihrem Eingang in eines der vier Archive, die hier vorgestellt werden. In deren Ökosystemen ‚leben' sie weiter, werden abgelegt, ein- und umsortiert, manchmal zerschnitten und weggeworfen. Die Foto-Objekte selbst treten in Interaktion mit Archivar*innen und Forscher*innen sowie nicht zuletzt mit den Künstler*innen, deren Perspektiven diese Zusammenstellung ergänzen. Aus der gesellschaftlichen Relevanz dieser Aktionen entsteht die politische Dimension eines jeden Fotoarchivs.
Die vorliegende Publikation präsentiert die Ergebnisse des Verbundprojektes "Foto-Objekte – Fotografien als (Forschungs-) Objekte in Archäologie, Ethnologie und Kunstgeschichte" (https://fotobjekt.hypotheses.org), das vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung im Rahmen der Förderlinie "Die Sprache der Objekte – Materielle Kultur im Kontext gesellschaftlicher Entwicklungen" von März 2015 bis Juni 2018 gefördert wurde. Verbundpartner waren die Photothek des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, die Kunstbibliothek und die Antikensammlung, beide Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz sowie das Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Künstler*innen: Johannes Braun & Toby Cornish, Ola Kolehmainen, Joachim Schmid, Elisabeth Tonnard, Akram Zaatari

Gestaltung: Andreas Trogisch, Heike Grebin (troppo design, Berlin)

Kerber Verlag, Bielefeld 2020
288 Seiten
ISBN 978-3-7356-0477-4