Visual Resources

An International Journal of Documentation

ISSN: 0197-3762 (Print) 1477-2809 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gvir20

Introduction
Chiara Franceschini & Katia Mazzucco
To cite this article: Chiara Franceschini & Katia Mazzucco (2014) Introduction, Visual
Resources, 30:3, 171-180, DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2014.936097
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2014.936097

Published online: 11 Aug 2014.

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Introduction

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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 of owers,
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 this
special issue, which focuses on theories and practices of thematic ordering in ve different 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 Depression 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 research
tool in libraries and art history.2 They all developed their particular systems of classication 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
(18661929) in Hamburg and greatly expanded by his assistants and followers in
London 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
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2014.936097

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the workshop Classifying Content: Photographic Collections and Theories of Thematic Ordering at 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 different 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 cultural
theories and practices, such as for example art history, has progressed enormously.3
However, within this scholarly trend, the specic questions concerning classication, 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 concentrating 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 been
argued 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 thematic in a straightforward sense to mean of or pertaining to a theme or themes, where theme is the subject of discourse or 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 the visual conventions and even the stylistic elements that are embedded in gural
motifs.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 arrangements 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 Institut. 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 to
observe something more than just a practical need to arrange photos. To start with,

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Introduction

173

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 arrangement 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, we
can 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 possible their iconographical collection of all the medieval
and Renaissance visual materials related to the history of the classical tradition in religion, 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 classication 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-reference
index, 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 Kunsthistorisches Institut) and cultural historians or art-historical cultural historians (the
Warburg Photographic Collection), to those conceived for commercial purposes (the
Bettmann 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 belongsin other words its
archival statusmodify (add or subtract) values for each individual photograph, according 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 analog
to digital systems, by analyzing in particular the digital developments of two art

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Franceschini and Mazzucco

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 project
and 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 Rijksbureau for Kunsthistorische Documentatie (Rieke van Leeuwen) took part in the workshop, contributing in particular to the nal round table. The discussion highlighted the
many 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 developed 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 or
not. Iconclass was devised between the 1950s and the 1960s, when classication enterprises 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, which
is 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 established at Princeton 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 Florencethe same town where, about forty years earlier, he had started to collect books

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175

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 Breitenbach, 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 the
Warburg 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 Breitenbach, 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 eyes were indebted to the Hamburg
school 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
19311932, Henry Balfour (18631939), curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in
Oxford, created a systematic archive out of the collection of ethnographic photographs 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 classication system has been recently read within a wider universalizing archival movement 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 visual
arts.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 collection 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 that
no 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 googlied world 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 programmers of Google. At the center of this problem lies the relationship between words
and images. Pattern recognition technology, though promising, is not yet fully developed, 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 Googles 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 in
the 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 to Susan Sontag, all
photographs wait to be explained or falsied by their captions.21 Once again, this
brings us back to Robert Kleins question: what is the subject of the picture? And

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Introduction

177

what is the difference between subject and caption or title? These issues are relevant
to every student of iconographyespecially of pre-modern art, when titles are 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 new ndings, which allow the authors not only to shed new light on many
aspects of the history of the collections under discussion, but also to explore with
new insight the links between and among documentary photography, art history, cultural 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 collections in the world allow them to compete, if only for the purpose of academic research, 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 discussed 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 mentioned
above, 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 points
of 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 particular, 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

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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 Renaissance
art and early modern history. From 20102013, she worked as an academic assistant in the
Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute, where she previously was a Newton
International Postdoctoral Fellow (20092011). Other recent awards include the I Tatti
Prize for Best Essay by a Junior Scholar (2011) for her The Nudes in Limbo: Michelangelos Doni Tondo Reconsidered, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 73, 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 Academy
for Advanced Study in America at Columbia University (20152016). She is currently completing 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 Florence, and at the Warburg Institute in London (2010). She has been British Academy Visiting 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
2
3

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.
Costanza Caraffa, ed., Fotograe als Instrument und Medium der Kunstgeschichte
(Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009).
See, in particular, Costanza Caraffa, ed., Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory
of 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 Resources 29, nos. 12 (MarchJune 2013). A recent conference on
art history and digitization took place in Pisa in 2012: Archivi digitali per la fortuna
del 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).
See the questions raised by Elizabeth Edwards, Ordering Others: Photography, Anthropologies 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 1852
1880, in Caraffa, Photo Archives, 26577.
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 Leicester, Spring term 2012; among her publications on art documentary photography and

Introduction

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8
9

10

11

12

13
14

15

179

the archive, see Looking Through Photographs: Art Archiving and Photography in
the Photothek, in Caraffa, Fotograe als Instrument und Medium der Kunstgeschichte,
11727.
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 Their
Motifs, 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 Warburg
Institute-Nino Aragno Editore, 2008), in particular the introduction by Paul Taylor,
110.
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 photographs 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 systematically
as possible our iconographical collection, beginning with graphic art and painting.
(Warburg Institute, Annual Report 193435, 1011).
See, for example, Hans Brandhorst, Aby Warburgs Wildest Dreams Come True? in
Baca, Helmreich, and Ortega, Digital Art History, 7288.
In addition to the ICA and the Photothek of the KHI discussed here, other German
photographic 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 als
fotograsche Praxis: Richard Hamann und Foto Marburg, Humboldt-Schriften zur
Bild- und Kunstgeschichte 7 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2009).
Colum Hourihane, They Stand on his Shoulders: Morey, Iconography, and the Index
of 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.
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 Resources 13, nos. 34 (1998): 243. In his description of
the 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 lINHA 15 (June 2003): 25.
See Katia Mazzucco, On the Reverse. Some Notes on Photographic Images from the
Warburg Institute Photographic Collection, Aisthesis, no. 2 (2012): 21732, esp. 218
19; online at http://www.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/11471/10930.
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.
Christopher Morton, Photography and the Comparative Method: The Construction
of an Anthropological Archive, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18, no. 2
(June 2012): 36996.
This collection was later reproduced for the Bollingen Foundation in New York and
renamed Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism. Since then the collection
has been increased and modied signicantly.

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16 Vielleicht besser nicht als Archiv sondern als Sammlung kunsthistorischen Photographien fr Erziehungszwecke, Warburg Institute Archive (WIA), General Correspondence (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 Resources 23, no. 3 (September 2007): 245267; Riccardo Bernardini,
Tracce: Jung e lArchivio di Eranos, in Jung a Eranos: Il progetto della psicologia complessa (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2011), 247353.
17 Elizabeth Sears, The Life and Work of William S. Heckscher: Some Petit Perceptions, 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 Photographs from the Practice, Politics and Poetics of Diplomatics, Archivaria 40 (Fall
1995): 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 absolutely partial list of them should include at least: all the websites of the worlds
museums (it is not by chance that the Google Cultural Institute connects people
around the world with art online, through partnerships with museums and cultural
foundations) 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, for
example, the Burlington Magazine, the Fondazione Zeri, the Photograph Archive of
Villa I Tatti, Arachne (the central Object database of the German Archaeological Institute and the Archaeological Institute of the University of Cologne), and the various
projects developed at the Getty Research Institute.