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Introduction

Chiara Franceschini and Katia Mazzucco

It is not always possible to establish a nonequivocal correspondence betweena figurative work and its “subject.” Consider, for instance, a painting of the1880s representing the corner of a room, a man in an armchair reading theJournal des Débats, a mantlepiece with a Louis XV clock and a vase of flowers,a mirror on the wall, part of a window, and so on. Of all these objects, whichis the “true subject” of the picture?—Robert Klein, Thoughts on Iconography(1963)

Robert Klein’s question is central to every iconographer who wants to identify thesubject of a picture or seeks to classify images according to their content.1 Even if, inpractice, they contrive to find a reasonable answer to this question, iconographersare aware of the limits and theoretical problems of their work. Beside the issue ofidentifying the subject of a picture, there is, in fact, the problem of how to describeit. A more general question thus arises: to what extent is it possible to use words todescribe, 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 five dif-ferent European and American historical collections of documentary photographs,mostly concerned with art history, but not all: the Photothek of the KunsthistorischesInstitut (KHI) in Florence, the Index of Christian Art (ICA) at Princeton University,the Warburg Photographic Collection in Hamburg-London, the Bettmann Archivein 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 ofCongress in Washington, DC. These collections and archives were all startedbetween the very last years of the nineteenth century and the first three decades ofthe 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-fication during the twentieth century, before moving them into the digital world.

It was in the course of conversations with the staff of the Photographic Collectionof the Warburg Institute in London that we came up with the idea of comparing theorganizing principles of a small number of photographic collections and archivesthat are different in size and scope, but chronologically close and, as revealed inthe articles in this special issue, historically linked one to another. And indeed, thecollection of art photographs of the Warburg Institute—initiated 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 1930s—served as the catalyst for

Visual Resources, Volume 30, Number 3, September 2014ISSN 0197-3762 © 2014 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2014.936097

the workshop “Classifying Content: Photographic Collections and Theories of Themat-ic Ordering” at the Warburg Institute in May of 2013, and now this special issue underthe same title. The six articles presented here highlight five case studies (the WarburgInstitute Photographic Collection being the topic of two of the essays); they also exposeour specific 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 atseveral workshops and conferences in Europe and the United States. Critical thinkingabout photo archives and about photographs as key objects for the study of culturaltheories and practices, such as for example art history, has progressed enormously.3

However, within this scholarly trend, the specific questions concerning classifica-tion, thematic ordering, and access to images, especially by means of keywords, havenot yet been addressed in full nor have their implications been examined.4 By concen-trating on the modes of thematic classification employed by various individuals andgroups 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 anddigital format) has given rise to a sort of “taxonomic freedom” about classification.5

The articles in this issue expose possibilities of constructing and refining taxonomiesto classify visual content through the use of photography.

We use here the adjective “thematic” in a straightforward sense to mean “of or per-taining to a theme or themes,” where “theme” is “the subject of discourse” or “a topic”(Oxford English Dictionary). However, to return to Robert Klein’s question, “visualcontent” indicates a range of different elements: from the depicted objects to thesubject or story, from the various visual motifs which form it, and can carry meanings,to the visual conventions and even the stylistic elements that are embedded in figuralmotifs.6 The five examples of historical photographic collections discussed offer a seriesof approaches to these various problems of description and classification.

We have organized the articles in this special issue into two parts: ClassifyingContent on Paper (ca. 1900–1950) and Transitions to Digital Projects. In the firstpart, we present examples of early subject indexes and systems of thematic arrange-ments for photographic collections in Europe and the United States in the first halfof the twentieth century—when the abundance of photographic material becomingavailable demanded practical ways of organizing it. Ute Dercks, in her article, effectivelyuses 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 (1877–1955), and Otto Bettmann (1903–1995), but the maincharacteristic of the collections is that most were developed by groups ofcollaborators, who have over time successively changed and adjusted the scope andthe organization of their respective projects of classification. Several of the archivesand 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 someof 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

there are different methods of arranging textual and visual tools and data within theimage archive of the analog era. There are cases of thematic organization of thearchive and of the card index, corresponding to a typological–topographical arrange-ment of the pictures (for instance, with the Index of Christian Art, discussed byColum Hourihane). But in other instances, miniature photos are attached to thecard index (at the Bettmann Archive, analyzed by Estelle Blaschke). Elsewhere, wecan appreciate the value of a material disposition, which corresponds spatially to thethematic logic of the system and acts physically as a visual index. Such is the case ofthe Warburg Institute Photographic Collection (described by Katia Mazzucco andRembrandt Duits), where information derives directly from the photographs andtheir physical location, and only incidentally with the help of a card index; such isthe case of the attributes of the saints, for which a partial card index is available.

Furthermore, sometimes we discover that the classifiers’ ideal target, althoughalmost always unrealizable, was actually to provide a comprehensive, virtual catalogof 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 farand as systematically as possible” their “iconographical collection” of all the medievaland Renaissance visual materials related to the history of the classical tradition in reli-gion, art, literature, and science.7 As Mazzucco and Duits describe in their articles, thiswas only one of the phases of the history of the collection and its classification system.Another telling example of the endeavor to classify and organize the whole of a culturethrough its images is provided by the Genesis-like scheme that was planned for the clas-sification of the photographs of American life in the Depression Era, as envisioned byEdgar Breitenbach (1903–1977), and highlighted by Elizabeth Sears in her article.Again, at the KHI the iconographic classification was different: a subject cross-referenceindex, while the overarching arrangement, albeit in constant development, followed atypological 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 first part also discuss thedifferent functions of imaged-based collections in the period under consideration, fromthose designed chiefly for academic art historians (the Photothek of the Kunsthistor-isches Institut) and cultural historians or “art-historical cultural historians” (theWarburg Photographic Collection), to those conceived for commercial purposes (theBettmann Archive) or socio-political scopes (the Farm Security Administrationphotography project). In all of these examples, the classification, the physical positionin the archive, and the series (or folder) to which an item belongs—in other words its“archival status”—modify (add or subtract) values for each individual photograph, ac-cording to the different purposes and scopes of the archive. This appears to be true notonly within the scholarly world, but also for the commercial field (the “reduction ofimages to the objects they depicted” discussed by Blaschke). This provides also anopportunity for a documental and historical re-evaluation of analog photographsdestined 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

historical photographic collections specializing in iconography: the digital version ofthe Index of Christian Art at Princeton (Colum Hourihane) and the Warburg InstituteIconographic Database (Rembrandt Duits). After presenting the historical context inwhich the ICA developed, Hourihane focuses on the process of translation to digitalformat an extremely refined system of iconographic description and classification.For his part, Duits provides the first account available in print of the current projectand scope of the Warburg Institute Iconographic Database.

The absence of a specific contribution on Iconclass, perhaps the most systematicattempt at iconographic description currently available, is a consequence of thealready abundant critical literature about its history and early digital shift, as well asthe specific topic and chronological scope of this collection of articles.8 Iconclass didnot originate in a physical photographic collection, and it was introduced only inearly 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 final round table. The discussion highlighted themany important historical links as well as the differences and similarities between thecurrent classification system of the Warburg Institute and Iconclass. The WarburgInstitute Photographic Collection played an important role as a model for Henri vande Waal (1910–1972), the creator of Iconclass. Subsequently, the two systems devel-oped independently, according to different principles: while the Warburg classificationsystem developed as a “bottom up” method of arranging existing photographs of thecollection in flexible iconographic categories and subcategories which reflect therange of subjects and to some extent their relative popularity, Iconclass was conceivedas a “top down” subject-specific alphanumeric system of classification, designed tobecome the standard language to describe any sort of depicted object, existent ornot. Iconclass was devised between the 1950s and the 1960s, when classification enter-prises became part of an intellectual move in the direction of standards of descriptionand automatism, which later linked with the development of computerization. Nowaccessible in electronic format by means of keyword search, Iconclass is currentlyused 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 reciprocalinfluences between the individuals and groups involved in the various enterprises. Asnoted above, a focus on the genealogies of thematic orderings and demonstrablehistorical links was one of our main concerns when planning the workshop, whichis now preserved in print in this special issue. In offering some general backgroundabout the featured projects, we hope to encourage the reader to explore these manyinterconnections as further described and discussed in the articles.

The Index of Christian Art was established at Princeton University in 1917, initiallyas the personal archive of Charles Rufus Morey.10 This was not the only initiative in thefield of medieval iconography at the time, but certainly it soon became the mostinfluential.11 From the late 1920s while in Hamburg, Aby Warburg started to workon Mnemosyne, his atlas project: one of the first occasions to present his visualapproach 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-ence—the same town where, about forty years earlier, he had started to collect books


and photographs.12 Still in the late 1920s, together with Fritz Saxl (1890–1948) andwith 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 hislibrary: this plan was systematized and recorded in a scheme by Saxl around 1930–1931. In 1931, Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), who at the time was teaching inHamburg and was part of the group of intellectuals gathered around Warburg,visited the Index of Christian Art for the first time.13 That same year, he formulatedthe first version of his three-level scheme of description and interpretation of worksof visual art. In 1933, the Warburg Library moved to London: at this point, the ICAprovided a model for the reorganization of the Photographic Collection, which, atthe time, was under the direction of Rudolf Wittkower (1901–1971). As Mazzuccodemonstrates in her article, the new system incorporated nuclei of the iconographicsections first classified by Saxl.

In other words, the thinking around the organization of visual resources, whichdeveloped, at first, around the Warburg Library in Hamburg and then, at theWarburg Institute in London, was influenced by earlier enterprises, including theIndex 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 agreat 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 classification ofthe photographs of American Life in the Depression Era carried out under the FarmSecurity Administration at the Library of Congress from 1945.

The extent to which Otto Bettmann’s “subject eyes” were indebted to the Hamburgschool is uncertain; however, as Blaschke argues, with Bettmann having studied historyand art history at the University of Leipzig from 1923 to 1927, it is highly probable thathe became acquainted with contemporary debates on iconography. One of his advisors,the historian of economics and culture Alfred Doren (1869–1934), was one of AbyWarburg’s close friends and colleagues.

In addition to the examples discussed in this special issue, other projects arenoteworthy, as they can be considered, in one way or another, as linked or at leastcomparable to those developed around the school of Hamburg-London. Around1931–1932, 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 ofboxes, which were intended to provide a cross-cultural research tool. This archiveraises questions about the legacy of cultural comparativism. Put in context withcognate projects—and in particular with the Warburg collection—Balfour’s classifi-cation system has been recently read 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,” thephotographic collection of Jungian archetypes developed by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn(1881–1962) according to the system of Jungian symbolism represented in the visualarts.15 Since 1935, she corresponded with Fritz Saxl and visited the Warburg

Introduction 175

Photographic Collection several times. The photographic archive, which grew out ofEranos meetings during the early 1930s, was established and used for travelingexhibitions. Somehow unaware of the fundamental difference in scope between hercollection and the Warburg Photographic Collection, in 1955, Fröbe-Kapteyndonated her original “collection of art historical photographs for education/learning”to the Warburg Institute.16

Returning to the field of art history, in 1936, William Heckscher (1904–1999), apupil of Panofsky’s, worked with Dora Panofsky (1885–1965), his first wife, on a col-lection of “Pathos formulae”: this rich photographic collection followed him toUtrecht, where a copy of the ICA is preserved and where, during the 1950s, Heckscherdeveloped an “index iconologicus.”17 Finally, as already mentioned, in 1951, Henri vande Waal, who was in contact with several members of the Warburg Institute since the1930s, wrote to Gertrud Bing (1892–1964) about his work on a “iconographical indexwhich could provide a directrix for the filling of iconographical material,” askingpermission “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 issueare concerned with one central question: how to use language to classify and to retrievethe content of images and for a specific purpose: academic, commercial, or political. 19

One of the central notions discussed throughout is the concept of “keyword.”Willinglyor not, our “googlified” world is dominated by the practice of looking for contents bykeyword searches. Google defines its mission: “to organize the world’s information andmake it universally accessible and useful.”20 Of course, the realm of images is a subset ofthe “world’s information.” Still, the problem of retrieving the content of images is socomplex that it has not yet been completely resolved—even by the developers and pro-grammers of Google. At the center of this problem lies the relationship between wordsand 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 theWeb for image content.

If we look back to the old, specialized analog archives of photographs described inthese pages, one question arises: before the digital era, and in particular before the era ofthe PageRank algorithms which are at the heart of the Google’s domination, first of theWeb 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, inthe cases under discussion, the choice of keywords depends on logic and the functionsof each collection.

By investigating the relationship of word and image, we also aim to offer elementsto rethink the boundaries of iconography, the relationship between iconography andiconology, and possible alternative methods of description and classification of thecontent of images. A further, related question is that of the caption or title of animage, an issue which photography amplifies (as Samuel Bibby, Associate Editor ofArt History, suggested during the workshop). In fact, according to Susan Sontag, “allphotographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions.”21 Once again, thisbrings us back to Robert Klein’s question: what is the subject of the picture? And


what is the difference between “subject” and caption or “title”? These issues are relevantto every student of iconography—especially of pre-modern art, when “titles” are rarelytransmitted—as well as to writers, editors, and museum curators tasked withcaptioning.

To address all of these different points, the articles in this issue produce a richrange of new findings, which allow the authors not only to shed new light on manyaspects of the history of the collections under discussion, but also to explore withnew insight the links between and among documentary photography, art history, cul-tural history, and commercial enterprises.

One final point, which was raised in particular by Berthold Kress of theWarburg Institute during the final discussion, concerns the larger picture and therole of the small and often fragmented image databases, some of which are analyzedin this issue, in the context of the current and constantly expanding digital world. Infact, at least in the small and extremely marginal academic world, the relativelyrecent 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 WarburgInstitute Iconographic Database, the KHI Digital Photo Library, together with themany 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 refinedand useful than what Google Images is able to offer at present. Here is anexample. 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 warriorwomen. The projects put in place by the classifiers to which this issue is dedicatedwere aimed precisely at enabling people interested in art and in the cultural historyof images to retrieve them according to the most varied queries—be they generic orspecialist.

Everyone agrees that what is needed today in the field of visual and cultural studiesis a greater collaboration and integration between the myriad of small and mediumdigital projects and databases which exist today, the scopes, logic, and selling pointsof which are often mutually complementary.

AcknowledgmentsPrevious versions of the six papers published in this special issue where presented anddiscussed 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), BertholdKress (Warburg Institute), Elizabeth McGrath (Warburg Institute), François Quiviger(Warburg Institute), Paul Taylor (Warburg Institute), Rieke van Leeuwen (Rijksbureau

Introduction 177

voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague), and Claudia Wedepohl (WarburgInstitute) for their contributions to the discussion and the final round table.

CHIARA FRANCESCHINI teaches medieval and Renaissance studies at University CollegeLondon. Educated at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, she specializes in Renaissanceart and early modern history. From 2010–2013, she worked as an academic assistant in thePhotographic Collection of the Warburg Institute, where she previously was a NewtonInternational Postdoctoral Fellow (2009–2011). Other recent awards include the I TattiPrize for Best Essay by a Junior Scholar (2011) for her “The Nudes in Limbo: Michelange-lo’s Doni Tondo Reconsidered,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 73, 2010[2011], a Fernand Braudel-IFER fellowship from the Fondation Maison des sciences del’homme in Paris for 2014–2015, and a two-semester fellowship at the Italian Academyfor Advanced Study in America at Columbia University (2015–2016). 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. Sheholds 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 (2008–2009),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 2011–2012 and she is currently working on restoration and photography atthe Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz thanks the support of the Istituto Veneto per iBeni Culturali di Venezia “Progetto Europa Restauro.”

1 Robert Klein, in Form 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., Fotografie 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 questionof digitization programs and the humanities, see among the more recent publicationsMurtha Baca, Anne Helmreich, and Nuria Rodríguez Ortega, eds., “Digital ArtHistory,” Visual Resources 29, nos. 1–2 (March–June 2013). A recent conference onart history and digitization took place in Pisa in 2012: Archivi digitali per la fortunadel mondo antico e della tradizione classica, Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore, December3–4, 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 VisibleLight: Photography and Classification in Art, Science and the Everyday (Oxford:Museum of Modern Art, 1997), 54–68; cf. Anthony Hamber, “Observations on theClassification and Use of Photographs at the South Kensington Museum 1852–1880,” in Caraffa, Photo Archives, 265–77.

5 This idea was suggested by Kelley Wilder during an informal discussion after a seminarof the Photographic History Research Centre at the DeMonfort University in Leices-ter, Spring term 2012; among her publications on art documentary photography and


the archive, see “Looking Through Photographs: Art Archiving and Photography inthe Photothek,” in Caraffa, Fotografie als Instrument und Medium der Kunstgeschichte,117–27.

6 For seminal observations about this, see Robert Klein’s article quoted above, whichprovides one of the earliest critiques of Erwin Panofsky’s 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), 129–47. Seealso Paul Taylor, ed., Iconography without Texts (London and Turin: The WarburgInstitute-Nino Aragno Editore, 2008), in particular the introduction by Paul Taylor,1–10.

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 thispurpose 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 1934–35, 10–11).

8 See, for example, Hans Brandhorst, “Aby Warburg’s Wildest Dreams Come True?” inBaca, Helmreich, and Ortega, “Digital Art History,” 72–88.

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 derBibliotheca Hertziana, and the Research Databases of the Getty Research Institute,just to name a few among the historical photographic archives, have adoptedIconclass. On the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, see Angela Matyssek, Kunstgeschichte alsfotografische Praxis: Richard Hamann und Foto Marburg, Humboldt-Schriften zurBild- 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 inCelebration of the Eighty-fifth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 3–16.

11 Charles Rufus Morey, “An Important Institute of Research, Princeton’s Index ofChristian Art,” Princeton Alumni Weekly 32, no. 11 (1931), quoted in Isa Ragusa,“Observation on the History of the Index,” in Colum Hourihane, ed., “The PrincetonIndex of Christian Art,” Visual Resources 13, nos. 3–4 (1998): 243. In his description ofthe ICA, Morey mentioned the photographic collection founded by Jacques Doucet inParis; on this collection, see “Le fonds photographique: La photothèque de JacquesDoucet: passé, présent, avenir,” Les Nouvelles de l’INHA 15 (June 2003): 2–5.

12 See Katia Mazzucco, “On the Reverse. Some Notes on Photographic Images from theWarburg Institute Photographic Collection,” Aisthesis, no. 2 (2012): 217–32, esp. 218–19; online at http://www.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/11471/10930.

13 His name appears for the first 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 Constructionof an Anthropological Archive,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18, no. 2(June 2012): 369–96.

15 This collection was later reproduced for the Bollingen Foundation in New York andrenamed Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism. Since then the collectionhas been increased and modified significantly.

Introduction 179

16 “Vielleicht besser nicht als Archiv sondern als Sammlung kunsthistorischen Photogra-phien für Erziehungszwecke,” Warburg Institute Archive (WIA), General Correspon-dence (GC), 17/11/1954, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn to The Warburg Institute. See: TorbenGronning, Thomas Singer, and Patricia Sohl, “A.R.A.S. Archetypal Symbolism andImages,” Visual Resources 23, no. 3 (September 2007): 245–267; Riccardo Bernardini,“Tracce: Jung e l’Archivio di Eranos,” in Jung a Eranos: Il progetto della psicologia com-plessa (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2011), 247–353.

17 Elizabeth Sears, “The Life and Work of William S. Heckscher: Some Petit Percep-tions,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 53, no. 1 (1990): 107–34; Dirk Jacob Jansen,“Princeton Index of Christian Art: The Utrecht Copy,” in Hourihane, “The PrincetonIndex of Christian Art,” 253–84.

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): 40–74.

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, PenguinGroup, 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’smuseums (it is not by chance that the Google Cultural Institute “connects peoplearound the world with art online, through partnerships with museums and culturalfoundations”) and, more relevant for this topic, all the databases currently in theprocess of being developed by the many big or small art historical photographicarchives and/or archives of art historical journals in the world, including, forexample, the Burlington Magazine, the Fondazione Zeri, the Photograph Archive ofVilla 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.


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