'Originals, reproductions, original reproductions: redefining categories in a documentary collection', in: Safeguarding Image Collections. Issues in the Management of photographic

47

Originals, reprOductiOns, Original reprOductiOns:

redefining categOries in a dOcumentary cOllectiOn

Erik P. Löffler

In 1936, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), a Marxist literary critic and philosopher, published an essay entitled The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility. In this essay, he stated that the unique properties and status of original works of art, defined by him as their “aura”, were affected by their large-scale reproduction. Eighty years on, we can conclude that quite the opposite took place: historic collections of reproductive photography have now acquired an originality status comparable to that of traditional works of art. The change in policy towards photography over the last decades at the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) is exemplified in five projects for the protection of selected photographic materials. Separate storage is usually combined with digitization. Perhaps, paradoxically, large-scale online availability of images seems now, in its turn, to be affecting the “original” status of collections of reproductive photographs, some of which were recently dispersed or even destroyed. Preserving the “original reproductions”, whilst at the same time profiting from the research options offered by modern technology, is a major challenge for art-historical picture libraries today.

The Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) is one of the leading international art-historical research institutes, managing a unique collection of documentary, library and archive material on Western art from the late Middle Ages to the present. It opened its doors in 1932, presenting to the public some 100,000 pictures of Dutch and Flemish old master paintings.1 Today, its more than seven million photographs and reproductions form one of the world’s largest picture libraries. In addition to recent digital images, it features tens of thousands of albumen prints and samples of other early techniques, both serial products (Alinari, Anderson) and unica,

both anonymous works and those by famous artists such as the Amsterdam Impressionist George Hendrik Breitner (1857-1923).

Originality

Walter Benjamin’s essay is today considered a major work in the history of modern aesthetics and political criticism.2 Central to his interpretation of the role of technological reproduction in aesthetic experience is the concept of authenticity. Reproductions lack the unique existence peculiar to a particular place, the specific “here and now”, or the marks of history of original works of art-what Benjamin defines as their “aura”. According to Benjamin, the large-scale dissemination of reproductive images, begun with the invention of lithography, also affects the aura of the originals.3

Paradoxically, eighty years later, in contrast with Benjamin’s essay (which was admittedly of political rather than art-historical intent), mechanical reproduction appears only to have enhanced the “aura” of original works of art,4 as is testified by the ever growing numbers of viewers flocking to see iconic works such as the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. And whereas, for Benjamin, there could be no such thing as an “original photograph”,5 the older photographs in our art-historical research institutes now also seem to share the status once reserved for the depicted works.6 This change in appreciation of documentary images followed earlier acceptance of non-applied photography as an independent art form, although the latter did not automatically confer originality status on individual photographic prints. That this new status is founded on more than such photographs’ documentary value is proven by the scholarly interest in the history of these pictures “as objects”, and in their photographers. Recently, a selection of early photographs from the RKD collections was included in an exhibition about the Dutch artist Willy Sluiter (1873-1949).7 The curator found the photographs in the RKD’s general picture library, but they were officially loaned as “originals”. Vintage reproduction photographs (for example, by Alinari) are now even sold as art works at important international art fairs like TEFAF Maastricht.

Today, the concept of originality plays a central role when it comes to selecting items for separate climatized storage, for instance, even purely as a key to the allocation of funding. But definitions of originality or authenticity are many and overlap. The former is often used in legal contexts involving copyright issues, for instance, whereas the latter is mentioned in the requirements for inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List, but

Originals, Reproductions, Original Reproductions

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was also a central concept in existentialist philosophy. Formulating a strict definition would be arbitrary and would not reflect the concept’s varied use in professional practice.8

From the outset, collecting originals was not considered a task of the RKD, so what today would be classified in this category was not acquired as such. This is best illustrated by the tens of thousands of etchings and engravings purchased in large numbers in the 1930s as documentary reproductions of paintings or drawings, and until some decades ago filed among the photographs and clippings from auction catalogues.9 When, from 1995 on, these prints were removed for separate storage from the documentation of Flemish and Dutch Old Masters, no major objections were met with, but the Nineteenth-century Collection proved more problematic. Opinions differ substantially on the “originality” of, for instance, anonymous wood engravings after famous paintings from nineteenth-century popular magazines. Often these were not even printed from an original woodblock but from electrolytic copies of such blocks, metallic printing forms that were available in large numbers from the 1840s onwards and could be ordered from stock catalogues. In the nineteenth century, critics usually set the boundary between “original” and “non-original” printing between the traditional manual techniques and their photomechanical counterparts introduced in the middle of the century;10 this distinction was probably promoted by traditional graphic artists, who saw their position threatened. Nowadays, this demarcation appears unconvincing. Images copied by hand onto a lithographic stone, for instance, are now considered more original than photolithographs, but when Lawrence Alma Tadema (1836-1918) made a series of sketches of classical figures (after decorations in his London home) for the Dutch periodical De Kunstkroniek in the 1870s, he explicitly wanted them to be reproduced photographically onto the lithographic stone, as that would eliminate the personal interpretation of a lithographer. For him these photolithographs were the best possible end-product of the artistic process (fig. 1).11 These days, graphic artists even use techniques like photogravure, originally developed for monochrome photomechanical reproduction after the great masters, to create “original works” which, as such, could be defined “photomechanical originals”.12

The category of photography is as diverse as that of printed matter, and so is its appreciation. The example illustrated here is a daguerreotype, after a pastel portrait drawing (fig. 2).13 Originally, its function was as a portrait. The person portrayed was probably already deceased, which explains why the portrait is after a drawing. Later it also came to serve as a substitute for an as yet unidentified work of art; now, however, its primary status is that


Fig. 1. Gymnasts, Photolithography by S. Lankhout after a drawing by Lawrence Alma Tadema (1836-1918), published in Kunstkroniek 1877. Collection RKD, The Hague.

of a rare example of early photography. The direct photographic technique did not involve a negative, which makes each piece unique. Nevertheless, even with indirect techniques that involve a negative, the latter is not the only stage considered “original”, just as etchings and engravings printed from copperplates are not considered less original than their printing form.14 Nowadays, the valuation of a photographic print generally depends on the photographer (“artist” or “craftsman”), the maker of the print (preferably the photographer himself or someone appointed and monitored by him),15 the age, rarity and complexity of the technique, the probable number of copies printed (limited edition by the photographer himself versus industrial papier infini printing by such enterprises as Foto Alinari),16 and the subject of the photograph: a picture of a landscape is considered more “original” than that of a sculpture, which in its turn is valued more highly than a photograph of a painting; lower again in the hierarchy is an image of an industrial appliance. All these categories are to be found in the RKD collections.

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Fig. 2. Anonymous, Portrait of Petronella van Capellen (1814-1848), Daguerreotype, after unidentified pastel drawing (?), 1850s. Collection RKD, The Hague.

Erik P. Löffler

Original photographs in the RKD collections

At the end of the twentieth century, the RKD gradually became aware of the importance and vulnerability of its documentary photographs.17 Chemical instability makes these more sensitive to dirt, air pollution, and acidic mounts than printed reproductions. Today, the RKD has a climate-controlled storage facility for photographic materials, consisting of three separate units: one at a temperature of six degrees Celsius for the storage of negatives and slides, and two at seventeen degrees for glass negatives and positives (fig. 3). The acid-free packaging is customized for the photographic technique, state of conservation, and size of the object in question, and a difference is made between non-digitized and digitized materials: the latter will leave the storage rooms only exceptionally: for instance, as exhibition loans.

The following cases illustrate the changing attitude towards photographic materials at the RKD, along with the problems arising from their traditionally different role and status in the institute’s collections: these roles vary from “documentation” to “archive” and “library”. This is not a complete overview of projects involving relocation of original photographs; the ongoing separate storage and digital processing of valuable printed matter and autographs from the collections of Press Documentation also lie beyond the scope of this publication.

The first major project for climatized storage and digitization of important photographic items from the RKD collections started in 1997.18 Selection was to be determined by art-historical importance combined with uniqueness and vulnerability, criteria that would become leading for all the projects described here. Since these criteria were subjective and open to multiple interpretations, they were discussed afresh for each new initiative; where necessary, external specialists were called on to advise. Checking the seven million images one by one was not an option, so the first project concentrated on collections in which the largest number of interesting photographs were to be expected: the documentation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Belgian and Dutch art, the portrait collection, and specific archives. The majority of the items selected are now available online in the database RKDimages; high-resolution scans are available on demand.


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Fig. 3. Climatised storage rooms, RKD.

Erik P. Löffler

The legacy of Max J. Friedländer

A subsequent project concerned the documentation on the legacy of Max J. Friedländer. Despite focusing on a single collection, it was nevertheless much more complex and problematic. In 1939, the RKD helped the German Jewish scholar Max J. Friedländer (1867-1958), a major specialist in the field of early Netherlandish painting, to settle in The Netherlands. In 1958, the institute acquired his art-historical legacy: some 30,000 photographs and reproductions, and part of his library. In 2007, Friedländer’s personal archive came to the RKD, on loan from the Friedländer heirs.19 The pictures, acquired from museums, dealers, and collectors, are often unique records of paintings’ earlier conservational state; in several cases, they document works destroyed during one of the World Wars or otherwise lost. Like most, private picture libraries, the collection integrates older groups of pictures or single items donated to the scholar by colleagues or of unknown origin.20 Of equal importance are the versos of the images, which bear annotations by Friedländer and earlier or later hands (some from after 1958), known or unknown, about attribution, provenance, conservation, and related works. A small collection of photographs with appraisals, usually sent by Friedländer to dealers or owners of the works depicted, was added to the collection from several sources (fig. 4).21

The handling of this picture library illustrates the evolution of the RKD’s conservation policy over the last decades. Initially, having been stamped with the text “Foto afkomstig uit het archief van Max J. Friedländer 1958”,22 the photographs and reproductions were merged with the general documentation on early Netherlandish paintings. A selection of images was even pasted onto cardboard mounts, with the annotations in verso then being translated into standardized typed descriptions. Subsequently, from 1999, the Friedländer Picture Library was progressively abstracted from the documentation and digitized, the scans being processed in the online database RKDimages. Friedländer’s notebooks, preserved in his aforementioned personal archive, are currently being transcribed and studied in connection with his publications.23 This project demonstrates how a collection as a whole can be a valuable source in the field of art historiography, and how this is affected if the collection is split up. It is important to realize that, half a century ago, keeping such an archive apart from the general documentation was hardly an option, as it would have made normal name- and period-based research impossible. Nevertheless, after the pictures had been removed from the regular documentation, they were not physically reunited with the archival materials.24 Once the whole


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Fig. 4. Max J. Friedländer, expertise on the verso of a photograph, 17 February 1937. Friedländer Archive, Collection RKD, The Hague.

Erik P. Löffler

collection (images and notes) has been digitized, it will again be possible to study the pictures in a digital reconstruction of their original context, without this detracting from the possibilities for name- and subject-based research.25

The handling of Friedlander’s legacy contrasts with the fate of the art historical legacy of Willem Vogelsang (1875-1954), The Netherlands’ first professor in Art History. This is partly due to the fact that his collection, smaller and more diverse than Friedländer’s, came to the RKD in different donations over a longer period of time, and its provenance was not always recognizable. His photographs of late-medieval Netherlandish sculpture, for instance, which are mixed in among the 100,000 images donated to the RKD by Utrecht University in 2007, do not, like most of his photographs of paintings, bear his name stamp; as a consequence, they were not recognized until recently, through his extensive annotations. Vogelsang was scarcely the equal of the specialist Friedländer, and his legacy is considered less important. Nevertheless, his annotated photographs of early paintings are worth studying, and his sculpture photographs, also profusely annotated by him, but often dating from long before his own period of activity, are important witnesses of otherwise undocumented early restorations. Discussions are now in progress about how this collection should be rendered visible and protected. Options vary from stamping all the dispersed pictures and providing them with protective packing, to removing all the items for separate storage.

George Hendrik Breitner

As early as 1961, the RKD received some 2,000 negatives and 300 positive prints, dating from around 1900, which had once belonged to the estate of the Amsterdam Impressionist painter George Hendrik Breitner (1857-1923).26 Breitner collected the cityscapes, nudes, figure studies, and portraits as a “photographic sketchbook” in preparation for his paintings; they were not intended as autonomous works of art. The then director of the RKD, Horst Karl Gerson (1907-1978), considered the pictures as interesting documents of an artist’s working process. Today we realize that the informality and unconventionality of these pictures make them early precursors of the snapshot (fig. 5). For almost three decades, the negatives and prints were kept with the regular documentation at the Nineteenth-century Department, until the 1990s, when they were moved to the climatized storage of the Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam. There they


56 57Originals, Reproductions, Original Reproductions

than 12,000 original portrait prints (5,200 online), and some 40,000 portrait photographs from before 1920, including a unique collection of cartes de visite, cabinet photographs and family albums.29 Portrait photographs are exclusively collected “in original”, but only recently have the photo-historical aspects of this collection become an interest: records of the now almost forgotten, local, photographic portrait studios, for instance, or the stylistic developments of the medium.30 Today these aspects justify their presence in an art-historical institute, as is proved by the assignment of funds for their preservation. A project for digitization and appropriate storage of the older photographic materials in this collection, including restoration of a number of important daguerreotypes, is currently approaching completion.31 At the present time, some 19,000 photographic portraits of identified sitters are available in the online database RKDimages. A separate problem, as yet unsolved, is posed by the some 260 family albums, containing more than 20,000 individual photographs. For proper conservation, the bindings often require a different climate to their contents; leather and mother of pearl, for instance, demand a higher humidity level than photographs. A comparable problem occurs in the RKD library with the (often unique or rare) mid-nineteenth-century auction catalogues and other books illustrated with original photographs; here, too, a solution is yet to be found (fig. 6).32Fig. 5. George Hendrik Breitner (1857-1923), Man and Horses on the Snow (Newly

Built Area at the Overtoom in Amsterdam), Silver Gelatin DOP. Collection RKD, The Hague.

Erik P. Löffler

stayed until the installation of the RKD’s own facilities in 2003. In 2011, the whole collection was digitized and made available through RKDimages, in combination with a digital publication about their history and new status.27 The cost of this project is partly covered by the sale of modern high quality prints from the digitized negatives.

Portrait Iconography

The history of the Portrait Iconography Collection differs from that of the other departments.28 Initially part of the RKD, the collection became an independent institute, the Iconographisch Bureau, in 1955, only to be reintegrated into the RKD in 1995. Its function is both art-historical and genealogical. The collection consists of more than 80,000 photographs and reproductions (40,000 online) of approximately 110,000 documented portraits of Dutch sitters from the Late Middle Ages to the present. Besides these images of paintings and graphic works, the department holds more

Fig. 6. Exhibition catalogue illustrated with albumen prints and original lithographs, Delft, 1863. Collection RKD, The Hague, 2014.

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Archivalia

The RKD’s Archival Collection consists of some 1,100 shelf metres of documents relating to artists, artists’ societies, art historians, critics, galleries, art dealers, collectors and restorers, mostly combined with smaller or larger numbers of original photographs. Important collections include the records of Kunsthandel E.J. van Wisselingh & Co. and the personal archive of Piet Mondrian.33 In 2008, Metamorfoze -the Dutch national programme for the preservation of paper heritage- awarded the RKD a sizable grant to digitize the archive of Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) and his third wife Nelly (1899-1975), housed in the RKD since 1990 (fig. 7).34 Due to the considerable international interest in Theo van Doesburg and De Stijl, this archive is consulted intensively. The 31 500 scans of archival material will be made available online at low resolution in the first half of 2014, with the option to purchase high resolution scans. Some 3,000 photographs included in the archive had already been processed in RKDimages. Once this project is finalized, the originals will have to leave their storage only on exceptional occasions. Creating a consistent, database, record format for description of the photographs turned out to be complex: a picture taken by the artist is considered “original” in its own right, and is consequently described as a photograph, whereas an anonymous picture after one of his drawings is seen as an image documenting an original work, in which case the database record describes the drawing. Some pictures that would seem at first glance to be anecdotal turn out to have been carefully orchestrated in order to create an almost abstract composition, which again forces one to consider them as “originals” (fig. 8).35


Fig. 7. Theo and Nelly van Doesburg Archive.

Fig. 8. Anonymous (Nelly van Doesburg?), Theo van Doesburg, Friedrich Kiesler, Enrico Prampolini and Unknown Man at the “Leger- und Trägersystem” in the “Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik” (Vienna), October 1924. Silver Gelatin DOP. Theo en Nelly van Doesburg Archive, Collection RKD, The Hague.


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On the other hand, a corpus of photographs reproducing the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum was recently destroyed, and documentary photographs at the Tate Gallery were rescued from a similar fate only at the very last minute.37 Documentary collections outside the museum context may face a comparable fate. As a result of the growing availability of online visual material and changes in art-historical education, many Dutch universities and art academies have transferred their photographic research materials to the RKD, and the future of several picture libraries in American universities is uncertain.38

The reproductions that once seemed to threaten the status of the original works of art are today themselves at risk. Apparently the “aura” acquired by historic reproductive photography in the last decades of the twentieth century is now weakened by the digital revolution. In addition, the recent economic crisis has also affected the art-historical world, exacting choices in which the expertise of conservators and other specialists is often overruled. A much heard argument for deaccessioning documentation after microfilming, digitization etc. is that, otherwise, both the copies and the originals would have to be maintained, which would increase costs. Dispersal or even destruction of “originals” after digitization, called substitution, is a widespread (if admittedly still highly controversial) practice in The Netherlands for the archives of public institutions, albeit within specific boundaries as published by the Dutch Cultural Heritage Inspectorate.39 An interesting example of this practice outside The Netherlands is the correspondence archive of the Corsini’s, Florentine merchants in London. After they had been photocopied and microfilmed by the Guildhall Library (London), with the financial support of the Getty Research Institute, the approximately 3 600 trade letters and other documents from the 1567-1637 period were auctioned off by Christie’s of London in 1984-1986.40 Here “originality” played a cynical role, as it made dispersion financially interesting: the Corsini letters were especially attractive for collectors of early postal marks.

In 2009-2011, in response to these developments, the Courtauld Institute of Fine Arts (London), the Kunsthistorisches Institut (Florenz), and the Institute of Fine Arts (New York City) organized four conferences on documentary photography entitled Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History.41 Topics included the role of photography in nineteenth-century art scholarship and national culture, and developments in the status and use of art-historical photographic archives in the twentieth century. A central theme concerned the realization that, over time, our institutions have themselves become sources for research; in their original

The most diverse photographic collections are probably those held by the Department of Technical Documentation. The art works documented range from Van Eyck to Mondrian. Among the large numbers of images, which range from glass negatives to born-digitals, are infrared reflectograms, X-rays and ultraviolet photographs. The collection includes the archives of Prof. Johan R.J. van Asperen de Boer, pioneer in infrared research, and those of the Rembrandt Research Project. The RKD also makes available technical documentation held by other institutions, such as partners in The Rembrandt Database, a project initiated by the RKD and the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis (The Hague), and financially supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (New York City). The aim of this project is to create an online database of technical and art-historical documentation about paintings by, or attributed (or formerly attributed) to Rembrandt, from an international selection of museums and other institutions. The database already contains large numbers of both recent, digital-born technical images, as well as older ones that have been digitized for this purpose.36

These examples show the complexity of the management of a historic, but still actively growing, picture library. The varied history of its components, the diverse materials, and the almost unmanageable numbers demand compromises and pragmatic choices. The different projects, which bring images together physically (in climatized storage) and virtually (in an image database) have a unifying effect on the handling of vulnerable materials in different departments and increase awareness of the treasures hidden in the RKD files. Many discoveries are made, which will, in turn, lead to new preservation projects. New acquisitions will now undoubtedly be handled in accordance with the insights acquired since 1997.

Reproductions in the age of digitization

As numerous museums are digitizing their collections, works of art are progressively becoming available online. In the past few years, for instance, the print rooms of the British Museum, the Louvre, the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum (Braunschweig) and the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) have unveiled hundreds of thousands of works via their websites. Originals thus become accessible worldwide, while at the same time being protected from the wear and tear of constant use. In this way, the analogue, usually black-and-white, photographic documentation that museums and print rooms had formed for research purposes loses its function. In the last decade, several of these collections have been handed over to institutions such as the RKD.

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cohesion, and with the traces of their use, the physical collections tell a story that cannot be read from a digital substitute. The arguments in the contributions echo Benjamin’s definition of the “aura”, now applied to documentary photography. During the first meeting in London in June 2009, a group of representatives of leading art-historical research institutions drew up the Florence Declaration: Recommendations for the Preservation of Analogue Photo Archives, which emphasizes the importance of analogue collections for the future of the history of art, the humanities, and the social sciences. Institutions and individuals were (and still are) invited to subscribe to the declaration.42

The growing online availability of art images has consequences not only for reproductive images themselves, but also for the status of the institutions that manage them. A peculiarity of Google-indexed image databases is that the location of the originals seems to lose relevance. Declining numbers of physical visitors may seem a setback at a time when shrinking budgets compel us to attract new, private funding, whilst, on the other hand, new technologies are offering research options that were unimaginable until recently. The major challenge facing our art-historical research institutions today is to redefine our status in a digital world.

Digital originals

For several decades now, artists have created digital works of art, using computer files (images, programs) rather than physical artefacts as originals.43 Recently, in Amsterdam, the LIMA (Living Media Art) Foundation was established, an international platform for the storage and conservation of digital art.44 Just as photographic reproductions gradually came to share in the aura of traditional works of art some time after the acquisition of originality status by non-applied photography, this may one day be the case with documentary digital files, now that this technique is also being used by contemporary artists. The Amsterdam Museum recently acquired De Digitale Stad (The Digital City), one of the first online community networks (online during the 1993-2001 period).45 One day, the preservation of “documentary digital originals” will probably be an interesting subject for a symposium.


Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the following colleagues for their help, advice, and corrections: Wietse Coppes, Michiel Franken, Mayken Jonkman, Suzanne Laemers, Patrick Larsen, Marieke de Natris and Reinier van ‘t Zelfde. I also wish to thank Maartje van den Heuvel (Curator of Photography at Special Collections, Leiden University), Hans Rooseboom (Curator of Photography, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and Maria Sherwood-Smith (language editor).

Notes

1 www.rkd.nl.2 Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. The 1936 edition was a French translation, Benjamin subsequently rewrote the essay and, after editorial work by Theodore and Margarethe Adorno, it was posthumously published in its commonly recognized form in 1955; the annotated re-edition of the 1955 version used here is by Benjamin & Schöttker 2007; see also Verhoogt 2007, pp. 18-20.3 Benjamin & Schöttker 2007, p. 14; Van Leeuwen 2009, pp. 183-185. The “aura”-concept was developed further in Berger 1972, while Knizek 1993 discusses its ambiguity.4 Knizek 1993, p. 362.5 Benjamin & Schöttker 2007, pp. 19-20; Verhoogt 2007, p. 19. In his discussion of photography in his 1931 essay on (admittedly non-reproductive) photography (Benjamin 1931), the author was more ambivalent than in 1936.6 Knizek (1993, pp. 360-361) already suggested that the reproduction could partake in the aura of the original in this way.7 In the catalogue, they were illustrated as objects rather than as images, i.e. including the annotated mounts. See: Tiny de Liefde-Van Brakel, Yvonne van Eekelen, Else Speelman, exhibition catalogue Willy Sluiter aan Zee, Katwijk (Katwijks Museum). 1 October 2013-11 January 2014, figs. 5, 50, 55, 102 (signed by the artist) and 126.8 For these concepts in general, see Dutton 2003; in relation to photography, see Matyssek 2011, pp. 355-357.9 Vreeburg 2007.10 The early photomechanical techniques are often difficult to identify, or to distinguish from their manual counterparts. The same name was applied to different new processes at the same time; however, for commercial (or patent) reasons new names were invented for existing techniques. For a recent comprehensive overview, see Van Dijk & Leijerzapf 2011.11 Verhoogt 2007, pp. 469-473.12 See, for example, De Zoete 1988.

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13 The RKD’s small collection of daguerreotypes is available both in the RKDimages and RKDportraits databases and at www.daguerreobase.org. For the restoration of this collection, see De Natris 2011.14 On the “originality” of negatives and/or their positive prints, see Matyssek 2011, pp. 355-357.15 Since the end of the twentieth century, most professional photographers have left actual printing to professional laboratories, which have the technical equipment and necessary skills to guarantee the best results.16 Van Dijk & Leijerzapf 2002. 17 For a recent discussion of the changed status of photography in French public collections, see Bocard 2013 and Figini 2013. A practical manual for selection is Jonker & Boom 1996.18 Rooseboom 1998.19 Until then the archive, still the property of the heirs, was kept at Utrecht University; Laemers 2005; Laemers 2009.20 Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, Germany’s largest photo library with two million images online, also embedded older photographic archives in its collections, sometimes without proper provenance registration; Matyssek 2011, pp. 355-357.21 Today this painting is in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, inv. no. 3380, as: anonymous, c. 1480; see RKDimages, artwork number 201156.22 = Photograph from the archive of Max J. Friedländer 1958.23 For the last ten years, this project has been led by Suzanne Laemers, curator for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Netherlandish paintings at the RKD. She is currently writing a PhD thesis about this important scholar and his archive.24 The reasons for this are not only conservational: the picture library belongs to the RKD, whereas the archive is on loan.25 Bocard 2013 discusses this problem in relation to French museums and archives.26 Rooseboom 1997; Jonkman 2011; Molenaar & Vuister 2011.27 http://breitnerenglish.rkdmonographs.nl/.28 Vieveen 1995.29 The carte de visite, a standardized format of ca. 10.5x6.5 cm was popular from its invention in the 1850s until the 1920s; since the 1870s, it had had competition from the larger cabinet format of ca. 11x17 cm, which was also used for art reproduction. This same decade saw the birth of the picture postcard, possibly inspired by the cabinet photograph, which was the same size. For the various formats, see Van Dijk 2011, pp. 112-113.30 For an example of the carte de visite tradition, see De Natris 2010. Benjamin discussed the “aura” of portrait photography in his Little History of Photography (Benjamin 1931; see also Knizek 1993); that essay is not discussed further here as it lies beyond the scope of this article.31 De Natris 2011.32 Hendrik Cornelis Rogge, Album. Verzameling van afbeeldingen der merkwaardigste voorwerpen, ingezonden voor de tentoonstelling van oudheden, gehouden te Delft [..], Exhibition Catalogue Delft, 1863.33 Ekkart 1999, Coppes 2012.


34 Coppes & Rens 2012.35 Coppes & Rens 2012, pp. 38-39.36 Ekkart 2003, Franken 2011; Donkersloot 2012; www.rembrandtdatabase.org.37 Alberge 2012.38 The Knight Visual Resources Facility (Cornell University), Irvine’s Visual Resources Collection (University of California) and the MacLean Visual Resources Center (Art Institute of Chicago) were closed down recently; [Editorial] 2012, p. 277.39 See www.erfgoedinspectie.nl/archieven/uw-archiefbeheer/digitaal/digitaliseren-en-vervangen. For the ongoing discussion on this subject, see Archievenblad 2012, No. 9. 40 Cox 1988.41 The programme and abstracts are available at: http://www.khi.fi.it/en/aktuelles/veranstaltungen/veranstaltungen/veranstaltung313/index.html. The papers from the first two meetings were published as articles in Caraffa in 2011. It is interesting to compare this project with what may be considered its predecessor, the Congrès international sur la documentation photographique, held in Marseilles on 19 October 1906, perhaps the first systematic approach to documentary photography. The proceedings of that congress were published in the Bulletin de l’Institut International de Bibliographie of that year and in Ernest Cousin (ed.), Annuaire-manuel de la documentation photographique: publ. sous les auspices de la Commission d’Organisation du Congrès de la Documentation Photographique, Paris, 1908.42 These institutions were: the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Witt and Conway Photographic Libraries, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, the Frick Art Reference Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Fondazione Zeri, and the RKD. For the complete text, see: http://www.khi.fi.it/en/photothek/florencedeclaration/index.html.43 An interesting example is the Dutch artist Bas Ploem (b. 1927), who has been active as a “digital artist” since the 1990s; see www.ploem-digital-transformational-art.com.44 See, for instance, http://www.li-ma.nl/en/. 45 http://re-dds.nl/.

Bibliography

[Editorial] 2012[Editorial], “The “Crisis”-Revelations, Reactions, Reinventions” in: Visual Resources. An International Journal of Documentation 27 (2012), p. 277.

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Alberge 2012Dalya Alberge, “Tate’s National Photographic Archive “rescued from Skip” after Internal Tip-off. An art Charity saved the Crucial Collection after Employee’s Call, but another Archive was dumped by the V&A” in: The Guardian, 23 February 2012.

Benjamin 1931Walter Benjamin, “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie” in: Die Literan‘sche Welt 38, 39, 40 (1931).

Benjamin & Schöttker 2007Dettlev Schöttker (ed.), Walter Benjamin. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Frankfurt am Main, 2007.

Berger et al. 1972John Berger et al., Ways of Seeing, London, 1972.

Bocard 2013Hélène Bocard, “La photographie dans les collections publiques françaises: un statut à conqueror” in: Revue de l’Art 181 (2013), pp. 41-42.

Caraffa 2011Costanza Caraffa (ed.), Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, Florence, 2011.

Coppes 2012Wietse Coppes, “RKD verwerft uniek persoonlijk archief Piet Mondriaan / The RKD acquires Piet Mondrian’s unique personal archive” in: RKD Bulletin 2012 1 (2012), pp. 31-35.

Coppes & Rens 2012Wietse Coppes, Annemieke Rens, “Fotodocumentatie van Archief Theo en Nelly van Doesburg digitaal ontsloten / Photographic documentation in Theo and Nelly van Doesburg’s Archive digitally disclosed” in: : RKD Bulletin 2012 1 (2012), pp. 36-40.

Cox 1988Jacqueline Cox, “The Corsini Letters 1567-1637” in: Journal of the Society of Archivists 9.2 (1988), pp. 81-83.

De Natris 2010Marieke de Natris, “Koffie en kiekjes. Een schenking van foto’s van de firma De Lavieter & Co / Coffee and cards. A gift of photographs from the firm De Lavieter & Co” in: RKD Bulletin 2010 1 (2010), pp. 8-19.


De Natris 2011Marieke de Natris, “De restauratie van daguerreotypieën en ambrotypieën uit de collectie van het RKD / The restoration of daguerreotypes and ambrotypes in the RKD’s collection” in: RKD Bulletin 2011 2 (2011), pp. 31-35. De Raad 1999Jacqueline de Raad, “E.J. van Wisselingh & Co., een handel in ‘goede, gedistingeerde kunst’ / E.J. van Wisselingh & Co., a dealer in ‘good, distinguished art’” in: RKD Bulletin 1999 2-3 (1999), pp. 3-10.

De Zoete 1988Johan de Zoete, A Manual of Photogravure. A Comprehensive Working-guide to the Fox Talbot Klic Dustgrain Method, Haarlem, 1988.

Donkersloot 2012Wietske Donkersloot, “The Rembrandt Database. An Inter-institutional Research Resource for Art-historical, Technical and Conservation Documentation” in: Techné 35 (2012), pp. 122-126.

Dutton 2003Denis Dutton, “Authenticity in Art” in: Jerrold Levinson, The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, Oxford, 2003.

Ekkart 2003Rudi E.O. Ekkart, “Technische documentatie: verbreding van de basis van het RKD / Technical documentation: an expansion of the RKD’s base” in: RKD Bulletin 2003 1 (2003), pp. 14-17.

Franken 2010Michiel Franken, “Het RKD en de geschiedenis van de restauratie: een nieuwe aanwinst / The RKD and the history of restoration: a new acquisition” in: RKD Bulletin 2010 1 (2010), pp. 34-35.

Jonker & Boom 1996Marijke Jonker & Mattie Boom, Foto’s naar waarde geschat. Selectiecriteria voor de waardering van fotocollecties, Rotterdam, 1996.

Jonkman 2011 Mayken Jonkman, “‘Een zee van modellen’. George Hendrik Breitner, zijn ‘Japanse vrouwtjes’ en andere wetenswaardigheden uit het negentiende-eeuwse modellenvak / ‘A sea of models’, George Hendrik Breitner, his ‘Japanese girls’ and other particulars about modelling in the nineteenth century” in: RKD Bulletin 2011 1 (2011), pp. 27-33.

Erik P. Löffler

'Originals, reproductions, original reproductions: redefining categories in a documentary collection', in: Safeguarding Image Collections. Issues in the Management of photographic

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