Art historical photo archive
Art historical photo archives are collections of reproductions of works of art that document paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, architecture and sometimes installation photos. They are essential resource tools for the study of art history. Image collections deepen understanding of specific objects of art and the careers of individual artists as they also provide the means for a comparative approach to the study of artists’ works, national schools and period styles. The documentation that accompanies the images can also reveal patterns of art collecting, art market fluctuations and the changeable nature of public opinion. Photo archives build their collections and gather documentation for the works of art they record through purchases, gifts and photography campaigns. Information about ownership, condition, attribution, and subject identification is recorded at the time of acquisition and is frequently updated.
History
The founders of important art historical photo archives believed that a deep and broad visual knowledge was necessary for the study of art history. These pioneers, including Richard Hamann, Aby Warburg, Sir Robert Witt, William Martin Conway, Bernard Berenson, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot and Helen Clay Frick, were the first to realize the potential of photography as a means to provide researchers with materials that strengthen the documentation and interpretation of works of art. The photo archives they founded in the first half of the 20th century, now part of FotoMarburg, the Warburg Institute, the Witt Library, Villa I Tatti, the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, and the Frick Art Reference Library Photoarchive, are still used by countless researchers in the first half of the 21st century.Uses
- Art historical photo archives collect images of works without regard to trends or the popular reception of any given artist's work. They thus retain files for artists not held in high esteem but whose reputations among scholars may change in years to come.
- Many of the works of art recorded in photo archives are unpublished or relatively inaccessible since they reside in private collections or public institution storerooms.
- Art historical photo archives provide a forum for scholarly dialogue across the decades, affording art historians the opportunity to record opinions regarding attribution or current ownership of works they know well.
- As art history and art connoisseurship have matured, photo archives have played a key role, the fruits of which are most obvious in publications such as Bernard Berenson's lists of works by Italian artists and Richard Offner’s Corpus of Florentine Painting. The refinement of attributions of works of art recorded in a photo archive can lead to the reevaluation of an artist's career or the identification of a new, previously unnamed master. In this way, a photo archive functions in much the same way as the curatorial records of museum drawings departments, where annotations by scholars of several generations record the various attributions ascribed to the work over time.
- Photo archives aid researchers in their connoisseurship skills since they include copies, forgeries and pastiches.
- Multiple images of a single work of art help scholars trace the physical changes that have affected the object through time, damage, and conservation. Photo archives often document the full visual record of a given work of art, information that is unlikely to be published because of financial limitations.
- Photo archives enable discovery and innovative scholarship as researchers browse within and across artist files.
- Photo archives are essential to the study of works of art that have been destroyed or lost as a result of war, fire or theft.