Photographic Archives as Ecosystems: a Material Perspective 

The recognition that photographic collections devoted to art historical documentation simultaneously portray the methodology and content of the history of the discipline has led in recent years to a series of international studies. The historical perspective is bound up with a material approach: photographs are recognized as three-dimensional objects that exist in a temporal and spatial dimension. They are not only academic tools and mere documentation, but also objects of research in their own right, or rather “speaking objects” that are active in social and cultural contexts. This permits the overcoming of a purely functional understanding of photographs as two-dimensional evidence for the (art) objects they represent. From this material perspective, photo archives can be understood as ecosystems: open, dynamic and complex systems formed by organisms of different kinds which exert a reciprocal action upon each other and their surrounding environment – not only photographs, but also inventory books, card mounts, card catalogues, and even digitalized and electronic records that interact within the archive’s habitat. The focus on the archive as dynamic corpus, as a locus for research and encounter, draws attention also to the other actors involved: archivists and scholars act and interact, shaping the (photographic) documents with the practices and technologies of archival science. In my paper I will show which new and probing questions we can ask photographs and photographic archives if we adopt a material perspective, offering some methodological thoughts for the exploration of the epistemological potential of art historical photo archives.