Photography as Instrument and Medium of Art History

Historically grown photographic archives such as the Photothek are not merely repositories of visual information, but complex epistemic infrastructures that reflect the conceptual and methodological developments of the discipline of art history. For 127 years, documentary photographs—primarily of Italian artworks and monuments—have been collected, inventoried, catalogued, and incorporated into the Photothek’s holdings. Its classification system, the hierarchical organization of the collections, the acquisition policy, and the institute’s own photographic campaigns all embody research approaches that significantly contributed to the formation of a Eurocentric art history and its canon, which remains influential to this day. The photographs, which have themselves historical value, do not merely document cultural heritage but, in their cumulative entirety, constitute part of it.

Yet, based on the premise that every archive is also underpinned by political intentions, the question arises as to how cultural heritage is defined, and how cultural appropriation—often hiding hegemonial claims—relates to this definition. Art-historical photo archives are places where such questions can be renegotiated: Which art history is represented here? Which cultural heritage is canonized? What kinds of inclusion or exclusion take place through the metadata produced within the archive? Which impact has the archive as setting? And ultimately: To whom does the cultural heritage represented here “belong”, in the broader sense?

The reconstruction of ownership and affiliations is, however, also among the core tasks of provenance research. While in recent years, under the auspices of the material turn, archivists have increasingly directed their attention to the itineraries of individual photographs or entire fonds, provenance researchers trace the trajectories of the objects depicted in those photographs. The metadata inscribed on the mounts of the photographs provide clues in both directions, which frequently complement one another. Through the successive identification and digitization of mounted photographs documenting works whose present whereabouts remain unknown, the Photothek responds to the growing number of inquiries from the international community of provenance researchers and their heightened interest in shared metadata, thereby establishing itself as an integral node within the international network.