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Visual Resources

An International Journal of Documentation

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Introduction

Chiara Franceschini & Katia Mazzucco

To cite this article:Chiara Franceschini & Katia Mazzucco (2014) Introduction, VisualResources, 30:3, 171-180, DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2014.936097

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Introduction

Chiara Franceschini and Katia Mazzucco

It is not always possible to establish a nonequivocal correspondence between

a gurative work and its subject.Consider, for instance, a painting of the

1880s representing the corner of a room, a man in an armchair reading the

Journal des Dbats, a mantlepiece with a Louis XV clock and a vase ofowers,

a mirror on the wall, part of a window, and so on. Of all these objects, which

is the

true subject

of the picture?

Robert Klein,Thoughts on Iconography(1963)

Robert Kleins question is central to every iconographer who wants to identify the

subject of a picture or seeks to classify images according to their content.1 Even if, in

practice, they contrive to nd a reasonable answer to this question, iconographers

are aware of the limits and theoretical problems of their work. Beside the issue of

identifying the subject of a picture, there is, in fact, the problem of how to describe

it. A more general question thus arises: to what extent is it possible to use words to

describe, arrange, and retrieve the content of images?

Some of the possible answers to this series of questions are at the center of thisspecial issue, which focuses on theories and practices of thematic ordering in ve dif-

ferent European and American historical collections of documentary photographs,

mostly concerned with art history, but not all: the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches

Institut (KHI) in Florence, the Index of Christian Art (ICA) at Princeton University,

the Warburg Photographic Collection in Hamburg-London, the Bettmann Archive

in Berlin-New York, and the collection of photographs of American Life in the Depres-

sion Era organized under the Farm Security Administration (FSA) at the Library of

Congress in Washington, DC. These collections and archives were all started

between the very last years of the nineteenth century and the rst three decades of

the twentieth, that is, during the age of the establishment of photography as a researchtool in libraries and art history.2 They all developed their particular systems of classi-

cation during the twentieth century, before moving them into the digital world.

It was in the course of conversations with the staff of the Photographic Collection

of the Warburg Institute in London that we came up with the idea of comparing the

organizing principles of a small number of photographic collections and archives

that are different in size and scope, but chronologically close and, as revealed in

the articles in this special issue, historically linked one to another. And indeed, the

collection of art photographs of the Warburg Instituteinitiated by Aby Warburg

(1866

1929) in Hamburg and greatly expanded by his assistants and followers inLondon according to a plan that was devised in the 1930sserved as the catalyst for

Visual Resources, Volume 30, Number 3, September 2014

ISSN 0197-3762 2014 Taylor & Francis

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the workshop Classifying Content: Photographic Collections and Theories of Themat-

ic Orderingat the Warburg Institute in May of 2013, and now this special issue under

the same title. The six articles presented here highlight ve case studies (the Warburg

Institute Photographic Collection being the topic of two of the essays); they also expose

our specic interest and motivation to focus on an examination of thematic ordering.

In recent years, the value of historical photographic collections and the many dif-ferent digitization projects currently in progress have been featured and discussed at

several workshops and conferences in Europe and the United States. Critical thinking

about photo archives and about photographs as key objects for the study of cultu ral

theories and practices, such as for example art history, has progressed enormously.3

However, within this scholarly trend, the specic questions concerning classica-

tion, thematic ordering, and access to images, especially by means of keywords, have

not yet been addressed in full nor have their implications been examined.4 By concen-

trating on the modes of thematic classication employed by various individuals and

groups involved in the projects discussed, we hope to make a start. It has beenargued that the use of photography to reproduce images (in both analog and

digital format) has given rise to a sort of taxonomic freedom about classication.5

The articles in this issue expose possibilities of constructing and rening taxonomies

to classify visual content through the use of photography.

We use here the adjective thematicin a straightforward sense to mean of or per-

taining to a theme or themes,where themeis the subject of discourseor a topic

(Oxford English Dictionary). However, to return to Robert Kleins question, visual

content indicates a range of different elements: from the depicted objects to the

subject or story, from the various visual motifs which form it, and can carry meanings,

to thevisual conventions and even the stylistic elements that are embedded in guralmotifs.6 The ve examples of historical photographic collections discussed offer a series

of approaches to these various problems of description and classication.

We have organized the articles in this special issue into two parts: Classifying

Content on Paper (ca. 19001950) and Transitions to Digital Projects. In the rst

part, we present examples of early subject indexes and systems of thematic arrange-

ments for photographic collections in Europe and the United States in the rst half

of the twentieth centurywhen the abundance of photographic material becoming

available demanded practical ways of organizing it. Ute Dercks, in her article, effectively

uses the notion of

critical mass

to explain this process at the Kunsthistorisches Insti-tut. Some of the cases studied here involve an individual founder, such as Warburg,

Charles Rufus Morey (18771955), and Otto Bettmann (19031995), but the main

characteristic of the collections is that most were developed by groups of

collaborators, who have over time successively changed and adjusted the scope and

the organization of their respective projects of classication. Several of the archives

and collections under discussion are still collaborative works-in-progress.

Each paper discusses one example, dealing with issues of labeling, description,

categorization, and systems of retrieval through catchwords and keywords. For some

of these practices, it is perhaps more accurate to speak in terms of arranging

rather than cataloging. However, at least in certain instances, it is possible toobserve something more than just a practical need to arrange photos. To start with,

172 Franceschini and Mazzucco

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there are different methods of arranging textual and visual tools and data within the

image archive of the analog era. There are cases of thematic organization of the

archive and of the card index, corresponding to a typologicaltopographical arrange-

ment of the pictures (for instance, with the Index of Christian Art, discussed by

Colum Hourihane). But in other instances, miniature photos are attached to the

card index (at the Bettmann Archive, analyzed by Estelle Blaschke). Elsewhere, wecan appreciate the value of a material disposition, which corresponds spatially to the

thematic logic of the system and acts physically as a visual index. Such is the case of

the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection (described by Katia Mazzucco and

Rembrandt Duits), where information derives directly from the photographs and

their physical location, and only incidentally with the help of a card index; such is

the case of the attributes of the saints, for which a partial card index is available.

Furthermore, sometimes we discover that the classiers ideal target, although

almost always unrealizable, was actually to provide a comprehensive, virtual catalog

of all the possible images or depicted subjects of a given culture, or cultural context.For example, in the 1930s, the Warburgians set out to complete and arrange as far

and as systematically as possibletheir iconographical collectionof all the medieval

and Renaissance visual materialsrelated to the history of the classical tradition in reli-

gion, art, literature, and science.7 As Mazzucco and Duits describe in their articles, this

was only one of the phases of the history of the collection and its classication system.

Another telling example of the endeavor to classify and organize the whole of a culture

through its images is provided by the Genesis-like scheme that was planned for the clas-

sication of the photographs of American life in the Depression Era, as envisioned by

Edgar Breitenbach (19031977), and highlighted by Elizabeth Sears in her article.

Again, at the KHI the iconographic classication was different: a subject cross-referenceindex, while the overarching arrangement, albeit in constant development, followed a

typological scheme (architecture, sculpture, applied arts, painting) and, subordinately,

a stylistic arrangement in line with macro-narratives of style, such as Romanesque,

Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque,and Classicism.

By examining these different systems, the articles in the rst part also discuss the

different functions of imaged-based collections in the period under consideration, from

those designed chiey for academic art historians (the Photothek of the Kunsthistor-

isches Institut) and cultural historians or art-historical cultural historians (the

Warburg Photographic Collection), to those conceived for commercial purposes (theBettmann Archive) or socio-political scopes (the Farm Security Administration

photography project). In all of these examples, the classication, the physical position

in the archive, and the series (or folder) to which an item belongs in other words its

archival statusmodify (add or subtract) values for each individual photograph, ac-

cording to the different purposes and scopes of the archive. This appears to be true not

only within the scholarly world, but also for the commercial eld (the reduction of

images to the objects they depicted discussed by Blaschke). This provides also an

opportunity for a documental and historical re-evaluation of analog photographs

destined for obsolescence (Duits).

The second part of the special issue focuses on matters of translation from analogto digital systems, by analyzing in particular the digital developments of two art

Introduction 173

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historical photographic collections specializing in iconography: the digital version of

the Index of Christian Art at Princeton (Colum Hourihane) and the Warburg Institute

Iconographic Database (Rembrandt Duits). After presenting the historical context in

which the ICA developed, Hourihane focuses on the process of translation to digital

format an extremely rened system of iconographic description and classication.

For his part, Duits provides the rst account available in print of the current projectand scope of the Warburg Institute Iconographic Database.

The absence of a specic contribution on Iconclass, perhaps the most systematic

attempt at iconographic description currently available, is a consequence of the

already abundant critical literature about its history and early digital shift, as well as

the specic topic and chronological scope of this collection of articles.8 Iconclass did

not originate in a physical photographic collection, and it was introduced only in

early 1950s. However, representatives from Iconclass (Hans Brandhorst) and the Rijks-

bureau for Kunsthistorische Documentatie (Rieke van Leeuwen) took part in the work-

shop, contributing in particular to the

nal round table. The discussion highlighted themany important historical links as well as the differences and similarities between the

current classication system of the Warburg Institute and Iconclass. The Warburg

Institute Photographic Collection played an important role as a model for Henri van

de Waal (19101972), the creator of Iconclass. Subsequently, the two systems devel-

oped independently, according to different principles: while the Warburg classication

system developed as a bottom up method of arranging existing photographs of the

collection in exible iconographic categories and subcategories which reect the

range of subjects and to some extent their relative popularity, Iconclass was conceived

as a top down subject-specic alphanumeric system of classication, designed to

become the standard language to describe any sort of depicted object, existent ornot. Iconclass was devised between the 1950s and the 1960s, when classication enter-

prises became part of an intellectual move in the direction of standards of description

and automatism, which later linked with the development of computerization. Now

accessible in electronic format by means of keyword search, Iconclass is currently

used as a standard language by many art historical databases around the world.9

All six authors in this special issue emphasize the historical links and reciprocal

inuences between the individuals and groups involved in the various enterprises. As

noted above, a focus on the genealogies of thematic orderings and demonstrable

historical links was one of our main concerns when planning the workshop, whichis now preserved in print in this special issue. In offering some general background

about the featured projects, we hope to encourage the reader to explore these many

interconnections as further described and discussed in the articles.

The Index of Christian Art was establishedatPrinceton University in 1917, initially

as the personal archive of Charles Rufus Morey.10 This was not the only initiative in the

eld of medieval iconography at the time, but certainly it soon became the most

inuential.11 From the late 1920s while in Hamburg, Aby Warburg started to work

on Mnemosyne, his atlas project: one of the rst occasions to present his visual

approach and use of photography to fellow art historians was provided in 1927,

when he gave a lecture on the Valois tapestries at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Flor-encethe same town where, about forty years earlier, he had started to collect books


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and photographs.12 Still in the late 1920s, together with Fritz Saxl (18901948) and

with the practical help of many young scholars and assistants, including Edgar Breiten-

bach, Warburg formulated a plan for both the book and the image collection of his

library: this plan was systematized and recorded in a scheme by Saxl around 1930

1931. In 1931, Erwin Panofsky (18921968), who at the time was teaching in

Hamburg and was part of the group of intellectuals gathered around Warburg,visited the Index of Christian Art for the rst time.13 That same year, he formulated

the rst version of his three-level scheme of description and interpretation of works

of visual art. In 1933, the Warburg Library moved to London: at this point, the ICA

provided a model for the reorganization of the Photographic Collection, which, at

the time, was under the direction of Rudolf Wittkower (19011971). As Mazzucco

demonstrates in her article, the new system incorporated nuclei of the iconographic

sections rst classied by Saxl.

In other words, the thinking around the organization of visual resources, which

developed, at

rst, around the Warburg Library in Hamburg and then, at theWarburg Institute in London, was inuenced by earlier enterprises, including the

Index of Christian Art and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. In its turn,

the thematic/iconographic approach to the organization of photographic material,

which was developed by the various successive generations of Warburgians, had a

great impact on subsequent projects.

As Sears shows by following the trajectory of a single individual, Edgar Breiten-

bach, a strand of Warburgianism was infused in the great project of classication of

the photographs of American Life in the Depression Era carried out under the Farm

Security Administration at the Library of Congress from 1945.

The extent to which Otto Bettmanns subject eyeswere indebted to the Hamburgschool is uncertain; however, as Blaschke argues, with Bettmann having studied history

and art history at the University of Leipzig from 1923 to 1927, it is highly probable that

he became acquainted with contemporary debates on iconography. One of his advisors,

the historian of economics and culture Alfred Doren (18691934), was one of Aby

Warburgs close friends and colleagues.

In addition to the examples discussed in this special issue, other projects are

noteworthy, as they can be considered, in one way or another, as linked or at least

comparable to those developed around the school of Hamburg-London. Around

1931

1932, Henry Balfour (1863

1939), curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum inOxford, created a systematic archive out of the collection of ethnographic photo-

graphs that he had collected for the museum. The result was a thematic series of

boxes, which were intended to provide a cross-cultural research tool. This archive

raises questions about the legacy of cultural comparativism. Put in context with

cognate projectsand in particular with the Warburg collectionBalfours classi-

cation system has been recentlyread within a wider universalizing archival move-

ment of the inter-war period.14

A further example of this momentum is provided by the Eranos Archiv, the

photographic collection of Jungian archetypes developed by Olga Frbe-Kapteyn

(18811962) according to the system of Jungian symbolism represented in the visualarts.15 Since 1935, she corresponded with Fritz Saxl and visited the Warburg

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Photographic Collection several times. The photographic archive, which grew out of

Eranos meetings during the early 1930s, was established and used for traveling

exhibitions. Somehow unaware of the fundamental difference in scope between her

collection and the Warburg Photographic Collection, in 1955, Frbe-Kapteyn

donated her original collection of art historical photographs for education/learning

to the Warburg Institute.16

Returning to the eld of art history, in 1936, William Heckscher (19041999), a

pupil of Panofskys, worked with Dora Panofsky (18851965), his rst wife, on a col-

lection of Pathos formulae: this rich photographic collection followed him to

Utrecht, where a copy of the ICA is preserved and where, during the 1950s, Heckscher

developed an index iconologicus.17 Finally, as already mentioned, in 1951, Henri van

de Waal, who was in contact with several members of the Warburg Institute since the

1930s, wrote to Gertrud Bing (18921964) about his work on a iconographical index

which could provide a directrix for the lling of iconographical material, asking

permission

to test (its) system at the practice of your collections to make sure thatno important items have been left out.18

From a theoretical point of view, all of the examples discussed in this special issue

are concerned with one central question: how to use language to classify and to retrieve

the content of images and for a specic purpose: academic, commercial, or political. 19

One of the central notions discussed throughout is the concept of keyword.Willingly

or not, our googliedworld is dominated by the practice of looking for contents by

keyword searches. Google denes its mission: to organize the worlds information and

make it universally accessible and useful.20 Of course, the realm of images is a subset of

the worlds information.Still, the problem of retrieving the content of images is so

complex that it has not yet been completely resolvedeven by the developers and pro-grammers of Google. At the center of this problem lies the relationship between words

and images. Pattern recognition technology, though promising, is not yet fully devel-

oped, and it is still through keywords that Google Images allows users to search the

Web for image content.

If we look back to the old, specialized analog archives of photographs described in

these pages, one question arises: before the digital era, and in particular before the era of

the PageRank algorithms which are at the heart of the Google s domination,rst of the

Web and then of advertising (through the practice of content-targeted advertising),

what tools were developed by archivists, curators, art historians, and others working inthe image business to quickly retrieve the content of images? As one might expect, in

the cases under discussion, the choice of keywords depends on logic and the functions

of each collection.

By investigating the relationship of word and image, we also aim to offer elements

to rethink the boundaries of iconography, the relationship between iconography and

iconology, and possible alternative methods of description and classication of the

content of images. A further, related question is that of the caption or title of an

image, an issue which photography amplies (as Samuel Bibby, Associate Editor of

Art History, suggested during the workshop). In fact, according toSusan Sontag, all

photographs wait to be explained or falsied by their captions.21 Once again, thisbrings us back to Robert Kleins question: what is the subject of the picture? And


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what is the difference between subjectand caption or title? These issues are relevant

to every student of iconographyespecially of pre-modern art, when titlesare rarely

transmittedas well as to writers, editors, and museum curators tasked with

captioning.

To address all of these different points, the articles in this issue produce a rich

range of newndings, which allow the authors not only to shed new light on manyaspects of the history of the collections under discussion, but also to explore with

new insight the links between and among documentary photography, art history, cul-

tural history, and commercial enterprises.

One nal point, which was raised in particular by Berthold Kress of the

Warburg Institute during the nal discussion, concerns the larger picture and the

role of the small and often fragmented image databases, some of which are analyzed

in this issue, in the context of the current and constantly expanding digital world. In

fact, at least in the small and extremely marginal academic world, the relatively

recent digital developments of the many available art historical photographic collec-tions in the world allow them to compete, if only for the purpose of academic re-

search, with Google Images. Iconclass, the Index of Christian Art, the Warburg

Institute Iconographic Database, the KHI Digital Photo Library, together with the

many other projects disseminated around the globe (most of which are not dis-

cussed here),22 provide in fact tools for iconographic or thematic image research,

which are both rooted in their respective analog history and much more rened

and useful than what Google Images is able to offer at present. Here is an

example. If you type the keyword Amazon into the Google Images query box,

you will obtain millions of images, the majority of which are related to Amazon.

com. If you type the same keyword in one of the specialized databases mentionedabove, you will most likely obtain a series of images concerning representations,

in both high and low art and through different media, of the ancient warrior

women. The projects put in place by the classiers to which this issue is dedicated

were aimed precisely at enabling people interested in art and in the cultural history

of images to retrieve them according to the most varied queriesbe they generic or

specialist.

Everyone agrees that what is needed today in the eld of visual and cultural studies

is a greater collaboration and integration between the myriad of small and medium

digital projects and databases which exist today, the scopes, logic, and selling pointsof which are often mutually complementary.

Acknowledgments

Previous versions of the six papers published in this special issue where presented and

discussed at a one-day workshop jointly organized by us at the Warburg Institute,

London, on May 20, 2013. We are most grateful to all the participants and, in partic-

ular, to Samuel Bibby (Art History), Hans Brandhorst (Iconclass), Elizabeth Edwards

(Photographic History Research Centre, DeMonfort University, Leicester), Berthold

Kress (Warburg Institute), Elizabeth McGrath (Warburg Institute), Franois Quiviger(Warburg Institute), Paul Taylor (Warburg Institute), Rieke van Leeuwen (Rijksbureau

Introduction 177

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voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague), and Claudia Wedepohl (Warburg

Institute) for their contributions to the discussion and the nal round table.

CHIARA FRANCESCHINI teaches medieval and Renaissance studies at University College

London. Educated at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, she specializes in Renaissanceart and early modern history. From 20102013, she worked as an academic assistant in thePhotographic Collection of the Warburg Institute, where she previously was a Newton

International Postdoctoral Fellow (20092011). Other recent awards include the I TattiPrize for Best Essay by a Junior Scholar (2011) for her The Nudes in Limbo: Michelange-

los Doni Tondo Reconsidered, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes73, 2010

[2011], a Fernand Braudel-IFER fellowship from the Fondation Maison des sciences de

lhomme in Paris for 20142015, and a two-semester fellowship at the Italian Academyfor Advanced Study in America at Columbia University (20152016). She is currently com-

pleting a monograph on representations of limbo in the Renaissance.

KATIA MAZZUCCO is a researcher specializing in history of art and photography. She

holds a PhD in art history and classical tradition from the University of Siena (2006),and has been a post-doctoral fellow at the IUAV University in Venice (20082009),

post-doctoral short-term fellow at the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Flor-

ence, and at the Warburg Institute in London (2010). She has been British Academy Vis-iting Scholar 20112012 and she is currently working on restoration and photography at

the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz thanks the support of the Istituto Veneto per i

Beni Culturali di Venezia Progetto Europa Restauro.

1 Robert Klein, inForm and Meaning: Essays on the Renaissance and Modern Art, trans.Madeline Jay and Leon Wieseltier (New York: Viking Press, 1979), 143.

2 Costanza Caraffa, ed., Fotograe als Instrument und Medium der Kunstgeschichte(Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009).

3 See, in particular, Costanza Caraffa, ed.,Photo Archives and the Photographic Memoryof Art History(Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011). For an overview on the question

of digitization programs and the humanities, see among the more recent publications

Murtha Baca, Anne Helmreich, and Nuria Rodrguez Ortega, eds., Digital Art

History, Visual Resources29, nos. 12 (MarchJune 2013). A recent conference on

art history and digitization took place in Pisa in 2012: Archivi digitali per la fortunadel mondo antico e della tradizione classica, Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore, December

34, 2012: online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Nbmeeg4TQ&list=

PL4eX8mtGxkAk9quO-zeKVcf0DfUyIFuoM).4 See the questions raised by Elizabeth Edwards, Ordering Others: Photography, An-

thropologies and Taxonomies, in Chrissie Iles and Russell Roberts, eds., In Visible

Light: Photography and Classication in Art, Science and the Everyday (Oxford:Museum of Modern Art, 1997), 5468; cf. Anthony Hamber, Observations on the

Classication and Use of Photographs at the South Kensington Museum 18521880,in Caraffa, Photo Archives, 26577.

5 This idea was suggested by Kelley Wilder during an informal discussion after a seminar

of the Photographic History Research Centre at the DeMonfort University in Leices-ter, Spring term 2012; among her publications on art documentary photography and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Nbmeeg4TQ&list=PL4eX8mtGxkAk9quO-zeKVcf0DfUyIFuoMhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Nbmeeg4TQ&list=PL4eX8mtGxkAk9quO-zeKVcf0DfUyIFuoMhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Nbmeeg4TQ&list=PL4eX8mtGxkAk9quO-zeKVcf0DfUyIFuoMhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Nbmeeg4TQ&list=PL4eX8mtGxkAk9quO-zeKVcf0DfUyIFuoM

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the archive, see Looking Through Photographs: Art Archiving and Photography inthe Photothek,in Caraffa,Fotograe als Instrument und Medium der Kunstgeschichte,

11727.

6 For seminal observations about this, see Robert Kleins article quoted above, which

provides one of the earliest critiques of Erwin Panofskys theory of iconography.

Interesting observations are also found in Georges Roque,

Painters and TheirMotifs, in Claude Bremond, Joshua Landy, and Thomas Pavel, eds., Thematics:

New Approaches(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 12947. See

also Paul Taylor, ed., Iconography without Texts(London and Turin: The WarburgInstitute-Nino Aragno Editore, 2008), in particular the introduction by Paul Taylor,

110.

7 As the books give a picture of the history of the classical tradition in religion, art,literature and science, seen through the medium of words, so the collection of photo-

graphs will give a complementary picture through the medium of imagery. For this

purpose we have started upon the long task of completing as far and as systematicallyas possible our iconographical collection, beginning with graphic art and painting.(Warburg Institute,Annual Report 193435, 1011).

8 See, for example, Hans Brandhorst, Aby Warburgs Wildest Dreams Come True?in

Baca, Helmreich, and Ortega, Digital Art History,7288.

9 In addition to the ICA and the Photothek of the KHI discussed here, other Germanphotographic archives, including the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg and the Fotothek der

Bibliotheca Hertziana, and the Research Databases of the Getty Research Institute,

just to name a few among the historical photographic archives, have adopted

Iconclass. On the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, see Angela Matyssek,Kunstgeschichte alsfotograsche Praxis: Richard Hamann und Foto Marburg, Humboldt-Schriften zur

Bild- und Kunstgeschichte 7 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2009).

10 Colum Hourihane,They Stand on his Shoulders: Morey, Iconography, and the Indexof Christian Art, in Colum Hourihane, ed., Insights and Interpretations: Studies in

Celebration of the Eighty-fth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art(Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 316.11 Charles Rufus Morey, An Important Institute of Research, Princetons Index of

Christian Art, Princeton Alumni Weekly 32, no. 11 (1931), quoted in Isa Ragusa,

Observation on the History of the Index,in Colum Hourihane, ed., The Princeton

Index of Christian Art,Visual Resources13, nos. 34 (1998): 243. In his description ofthe ICA, Morey mentioned the photographic collection founded by Jacques Doucet in

Paris; on this collection, see Le fonds photographique: La photothque de Jacques

Doucet: pass, prsent, avenir,

Les Nouvelles de lINHA15 (June 2003): 2

5.

12 See Katia Mazzucco, On the Reverse. Some Notes on Photographic Images from the

Warburg Institute Photographic Collection,Aisthesis,no. 2 (2012): 21732, esp. 21819; online athttp://www.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/11471/10930.

13 His name appears for the rst time in the guest book of the ICA for that year; cf.

Ragusa, Observation on the History of the Index,222.14 Christopher Morton, Photography and the Comparative Method: The Construction

of an Anthropological Archive,Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute18, no. 2

(June 2012): 36996.15 This collection was later reproduced for the Bollingen Foundation in New York and

renamed Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism. Since then the collectionhas been increased and modied signicantly.

Introduction 179
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16 Vielleicht besser nicht als Archiv sondern als Sammlung kunsthistorischen Photogra-phien fr Erziehungszwecke,Warburg Institute Archive (WIA), General Correspon-

dence (GC), 17/11/1954, Olga Frbe-Kapteyn to The Warburg Institute. See: Torben

Gronning, Thomas Singer, and Patricia Sohl, A.R.A.S. Archetypal Symbolism and

Images,Visual Resources23, no. 3 (September 2007): 245267; Riccardo Bernardini,

Tracce: Jung e l

Archivio di Eranos,

inJung a Eranos: Il progetto della psicologia com-plessa(Milano: Franco Angeli, 2011), 247353.

17 Elizabeth Sears, The Life and Work of William S. Heckscher: Some Petit Percep-

tions, Zeitschrift fr Kunstgeschichte 53, no. 1 (1990): 10734; Dirk Jacob Jansen,

Princeton Index of Christian Art: The Utrecht Copy,in Hourihane, The Princeton

Index of Christian Art,25384.

18 WIA, GC, Leiden 8/8/1951, Henri van de Waal to Gertrud Bing.19 See, from the perspective of the archival work on these questions, the seminal work by

Joan M. Schwartz, We make our tools and our tools make us: Lessons from Photo-

graphs from the Practice, Politics and Poetics of Diplomatics, Archivaria 40 (Fall1995): 4074.

20 http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/[accessed on May 5, 2014]. Cf. James Gleick,

How Google Dominates Us,The New York Review of Books, August 18, 2011.

21 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin

Group, 2003), 9.22 Apart from the cases analyzed or mentioned in this special issue, an initial and abso-

lutely partial list of them should include at least: all the websites of the world s

museums (it is not by chance that the Google Cultural Institute connects people

around the world with art online, through partnerships with museums and culturalfoundations) and, more relevant for this topic, all the databases currently in the

process of being developed by the many big or small art historical photographic

archives and/or archives of art historical journals in the world, including, forexample, the Burlington Magazine, the Fondazione Zeri, the Photograph Archive of

Villa I Tatti,Arachne(the central Object database of the German Archaeological Insti-

tute and the Archaeological Institute of the University of Cologne), and the variousprojects developed at the Getty Research Institute.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/

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