Berenson Was Right! Why We Maintain Large Collections of Historical PhotographsAuthor(s): Martha MahardSource: Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 22,No. 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 9-12Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27949229 .

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Berenson Was Right! Why We Maintain Large Collections of Historical Photographs_ by Martha Mahard, Harvard University

[Revision of a paper given at the annual conference of ARLISINA and VRA in St. Louis, March 2002.]

Beginnings and Some Questions

Bernard Berenson's oft-quoted exclamation, "Photographs!

Photographs! In our work one can never have enough!"1 has been the foundation on which many photographic reference col lections for the study of art, archaeology, and architecture were built. Yet today we are faced with defending these collections and articulating new documentary roles for them. While I do not

presume to have answers for many of the questions raised, I have accumulated some notes on the early uses of photography in service to the other arts. It is my hope that, by putting some of these forward, I can help us begin to have a better understand

ing of the value of these collections and also begin to identify ways in which these collections may contribute to future studies.

First, let me bring current considerations into focus by pos ing some questions:

- How many of you work with collections that include hundreds of old study prints, black-and-white pho tographs of art and architecture mounted on grey boards and used by decades of art history students and teachers prior to the advent of the color slide?

- How many of you think of these collections as outdat

ed, useless, and taking up space you could use for

something more relevant?

- Finally, how many of you are under administrative

pressure from above to dispense with these supposed ly out-of-date materials?

Anthony Hamber, in his excellent series of articles on

"Photography of the Visual Arts," bemoans the loss and destruc tion of many collections of nineteenth century photographs of art "through un-uniform [sic] cataloging procedures or deacces

sioning campaigns."2 He goes on to point out that

...general 'clear outs' and much well intentioned reorganiza tion have also contributed to the loss of much unique material

about which we may now never know. While 19th century

photographs of architecture and sculpture are currently seen

as works of art in their own right, those photographs taken of

paintings are seen as almost worthless documentary records.

Hence throughout the years of the 20th century they have almost invariably been thrown away3

Imagine the loss to our history if, of the hundreds of images of the American Civil War, only the photographs of the Union

generals had been deemed of significance and the haunting images of anonymous bodies on the battlefields had been sys tematically discarded. Fortunately, large collections of

documentary photographs of painting, sculpture, and architec ture are still among the holdings of many academic and research

libraries, museums, and study centers throughout this country and Europe?the New York Public Library, the Frick, the Getty, the Courtauld, Harvard, and the Villa I Tatti, among others. In

addition, some of the photographers who pioneered in this field are still represented by modern firms such as Alinari

(http.7 /www.alinari.com/) and Frith (http:/ /www.francis frith.com/us/ ), to name only the most obvious. Thanks to the

many unsung librarians, curators, and collectors who took

Berenson at his word, this documentation has not been lost.

Photographs As Documents of Art History At the time when Berenson made his famous observation,

photography was indeed the most effective means of art his torical documentation. Perhaps if he were writing today, Berenson might instead have urged "images, images" rather than "photographs, photographs," for today research benefits from a multiplicity of options in terms of available formats. In

fact, the researcher may be indifferent to the form in which the research results are delivered as long as he finds a satisfactory reproduction.

Photography was, of course, not the first reproductive medi um to be put to use documenting works of art. Plaster casts,

woodcuts, engravings, and lithography all were employed at various times in reproducing works of art. By the last half of the nineteenth century, photography was vigorously asserting its

ascendancy over these other methods in a way that echoes the tension between analog and digital technologies today.

Numerous studies have reviewed the role of photography in art reproduction and in the discipline of art history. In trying to articulate a rationale for the maintenance of Harvard's docu

mentary collection (established in 1894), I have found it useful to

point to milestones in the history of photographic documenta tion of art and architecture. These milestones reflect a broad

spectrum of uses and users, including painters and sculptors, critics, collectors and connoisseurs, museums, art dealers, pro fessional photographers, art historians, public libraries, and academic libraries.

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Our collections can provide rich resources for research far

beyond their original purposes. As Susan Sontag observes, pho tographs, "when they get scrofulous, tarnished, stained, cracked, faded still look good; do often look better:"4 like the ruins of ancient monuments, they become more desirable through the

passage of time.

Although numerous contemporary critics predicted that

photography would replace painting, many others saw the new medium as offering previously unavailable benefits. A.A.E.

Disd?ri, whose introduction of the cartes-de-visite format in the late 1850s gained him a permanent place in the pantheon of pho tographic history, predicted "the establishment of central

photographic collections, international exchanges, the massive diffusion of cheap art reproductions, all the conditions in fact for a museum without walls."5

Milestones: Early Nineteenth Century Nic?phore Niepce's earliest successful photographic experi

ments in 1827, long before his partnership with Daguerre, were

reproductions of engravings by means of light-sensitive chemi cals. In an early example of an artist documenting his own work, a letter written by Ingres in 1842 documents his use of the

daguerreotype process. He wrote:

I have just finished my Saint Peter completely, and I can say

too, this time, to my satisfaction and to that of my superiors.

However, I am waiting to have some daguerreotypes made of

it, and to varnish it, before showing it to the public."6

William Henry Fox Talbot included a calotype of the Bust of

Patroclus, and other art objects, in his serially published Pencil of Nature7 (1844-1846). Talbot also photographed many subjects ranging from architecture to views of his home and artfully arranged still lives.

In 1845 John Ruskin wrote to his father about buying "some most beautiful though very small Daguerreotypes of the palaces I have been trying to draw... it is very nearly the same thing as

carrying off the palace itself; every chip of stone and stain is there..."8 Subsequently Ruskin lost his enthusiasm for photog raphy, fearing that its use could not be contained or properly understood.

William Stirling in 1848 published a limited edition of twen

ty-five copies of his Annals of the Artists of Spain (London: John Ollivier). The fourth volume included photographs. Here it is

interesting to note that current technology had not advanced far

enough to photograph paintings in situ so that many of Stirling's photographic illustrations are taken from engravings. As late as the 1870s, the Alinari catalog still listed over three hundred pho tographic reproductions of paintings that were taken from

engraved reproductions. In 1851 Francis Wey recommended that the Louvre collect

and exhibit photographs of works of art not in its collections, much in the same way that many museums were displaying commercially produced plaster casts of statues from antiquity. Louis Blanquart-Evard, who established his commercial printing firm in Lille in 1851, "made art reproduction one of the linch

pins" of his operation.9 Also in 1851, the Great Exhibition in London included an important display of photography. The

"Reports by the juries on the subjects in the thirty classes into which the exhibition was divided" (London: Spicer Brothers;

W. Clowes and Sons, 1852) was published in a large illustrated edition with 154 mounted salted paper prints.10 Inspired by the success of photography in the Great Exhibition, Prince Albert initiated a program to compile a complete photographic corpus of the work of Raphael in 1852.

The year 1852 also saw the establishment in Florence of the Fratelli Alinari photographic workshop; as of 2002, the firm claims to be the oldest photographic firm in the world with an

inventory of over three million images. Hundreds of thousands of Alinari photographs are in the files of academic study collec tions and continue to provide an excellent source of information.

Roger Fenton, best remembered today for his photographs of the Crimean War, was hired in 1853 (just before being sent to the Crimea) to photograph objects in the British Museum. Because he needed to do this work in natural light, his efforts were at first limited to Assyrian cuneiform tablets, sculpture, and carved reliefs which could be moved to his work space on the roof of the museum. After his return from the Crimea, Fenton

was allowed to set up his own stall in the lobby of the British Museum to sell prints directly to the public, and in 1867 he pho tographed the Elgin marbles.11 Fenton's dealings with the Trustees and their wrangles over prices and costs are a fascinat

ing insight into the practical side of the commercial photography business in the 1860s.

Milestones: Later Nineteenth Century In 1858 Charles Thurston Thompson was appointed the offi

cial photographer to the Royal collections and, with the help of the Royal Engineers, devised a way to photograph the enormous

Raphael cartoons then housed at Hampton Court. He had them removed from their dark gallery to custom-built scaffolding in the courtyard; "his twelve-foot long apparatus supporting collo dion-coated glass plates three feet square, ran on a small

tramway, and the whole operation needed a team of assistants to

execute."12 The firm of Caldesi and Montecchi was allowed to take a series of photographs of the cartoons at the same time and the joint results were exhibited at the Photographic Society and in Colnaghi and Co/s gallery in 1859.13

The South Kensington Museum opened its own section in 1859 for the sale of negatives, positive prints, electrotypes, and

replica casts. Anthony Hamber writes of this venture:

...demand was so great that it was impossible to print

enough photographs. Between 3rd October 1859 and 1st

March 1860 13,455 print requests were received from the pub lic and 2,315 from institutions...14

This rather remarkable success did not lead to the continua tion and expansion of the saleroom, but rather to an early example of 'outsourcing:'

The Sales Room was reluctantly closed on 31st March 1863

though the Department of Science and Art made agreements with commercial firms such as Chapman and Hall.15

In 1865, when the cartoons were presented to the South

Kensington Museum, Thompson was commissioned to record their removal from Hampton Court and their installation in the

Museum. Richard Redgrave, Surveyor of Crown Pictures, used these photographs to record changes in the condition of the

Raphael paintings after they had been installed in South

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Kensington. Entries in the Photograph Register in the

Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs of the Victoria and Albert Museum suggest that he continued to use this practice for the regular documentation of conservation and

restoration work.16

Also in 1865 the revered art historian Hermann Grimm noted the need for photograph collections to support teaching of art history. Grimm became the first professor of the history of art at the University of Berlin in 1873 and was instrumental in the establishment of the photographic study collection there. His

contemporaries and successors in the field were divided as to the

importance of photographs. The debate continued through the end of the nineteenth century.17

Photographer Adolphe Braun sent his son Henri to Rome in 1869 to begin a massive art documentation campaign of five

years' duration, starting with the Sistine Chapel.18 By the mid-1870s a number of archives and collections

already existed. By the time the First International Congress of Art

History met in Vienna in 1873, most European countries had

signed an international convention on art reproductions that

envisaged national collections of photographs, casts, and elec

trotypes as well as an international exchange of duplicates. Jakob Burkhardt, like Grimm, was an early and enthusiastic advocate of the use of photographs in the study of art.19 As I mentioned above, Ruskin had by this time completely changed his mind about the benefits of photography and sought to curtail its influence.

The young Vincent Van Gogh, working in 1873 as a clerk for the London branch of the firm of Goupil et Compagnie, wrote to his brother:

We sell good engravings well enough; among others, we have

already gotten rid of twenty or so artistic prints of the Venus

Anadyomene by Ingres. But it's a real pleasure to see how the

photographs are in demand.. .there's a good profit to be made

there. The photographs of the Mus?e Goupil et Compagnie,

wrapped in papers one inside the other, are sold at a rate of a

hundred a day20

In much the same way in which the shift from the black and-white lantern slide was resisted when the 35mm color slide was introduced, so academics debated the 'merits' of using pho tographic reproductions for the study of art. The debate engaged academics for at least another three decades, but librarians moved ahead, amassing sizable collections, and both photogra phers and dealers continued to supply a growing market.

Charles Cutter went to Europe in 1893 to buy photographs for the Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was an early and eloquent exponent of the uses of photographs for

public education, with a deep commitment to the information contained in images. When Harvard's Fogg Museum opened in 1894 it had a reference collection of nearly 15,000 photographs. In 1897, Herbert Putnam, head of the Boston Public Library from

1895-1899, followed Cutter's lead and purchased 6,765 new pho tographs in Europe for their newly established Fine Arts

Department. He bought from photographers whose names can still be found in Harvard's files: James Anderson (Rome), Fratelli Alinari (Florence), Franz Hanfstaengl (Munich), as well as Clarke and Davis (London).21

Technical Notes

Many of these milestones were made possible by continued

technological developments that improved the quality of

images, shortened the required exposure time, and refined the methods of fixing the image. Experiments continued with new

supports and binding layers for the photographs. Soon gentle men amateurs were superseded by a new breed of professional

photographers. Photography gained its commercial legs quite quickly as photographers moved to satisfy growing demands for their products. One difficulty that took several years to over come was the problem of the lack of sensitivity of early film

processes to a large range of the color spectrum. Furthermore,

early film could not successfully render impasto or penetrate the often heavy and yellowing layers of varnish on paintings. Interestingly, some of the early photographers persisted in their

experiments to find ways to photograph works of art properly. Many, in fact, were already involved in the sale of reproductive engravings and were well established in that market. The suc cess of their quest was eventually to eclipse the print as a means of reproduction.

By the 1860s most photographers had developed ways to

successfully capture "impasto" and varnish and the dim interiors of galleries and churches. In fact, as early as 1855, the Fratelli Alinari had succeeded in photographing the frescos of the

Camposanto in Pisa, mostly due to their semi-open location. The resultant prints were said to be "revelations about the actuality of the frescoes with all accidental flaws, scratches, breaks, and

proppings-up"22 including some large black metal clamps which one presumes to be holding the frescoes together.

It was not until the 1880s that a French chemist by the name of Attout Tailfer developed "isochromatic film" that was sensi tive to a wider range of color and eventually allowed much more successful photographic documentation of works of art.

How Does Our Heritage Continue to Serve Us?

The documentary collections that we have inherited will continue to answer important art historical and artifactual ques tions despite their changed role in the teaching of art history. They illustrate the historical progress of photographic technolo

gy in capturing color and grey scale. They document the existence of lost or irretrievably altered works of art and, because of the depth of early collecting, are in many cases far richer than

most of our current slide collections. These are now our research

collections. They hold answers to questions that have not yet been asked, but we risk impoverishing future scholarship if we fail to maintain them for both their artifactual and documentary value. As curators of these resources, it is incumbent upon us to

ensure that future scholars have the opportunity to learn from

them, that they are carefully preserved, and that improved sys tems of intellectual access to them will provide for wider,

cross-disciplinary interest. Let us exploit all the resources of the

technologies now at our disposal to further the goal of preserv ing and providing access to these irreplaceable images.

Volume 22, Number 1 ? 2003 ? Art Documentation 11

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Notes 1. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal

Artists and Their Works With an Index of Places (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932): x.

2. "Photography of the Visual Arts, 1839-1880: Part I," Visual Resources 5, no. 4 (1989): 293.

3. Ibid., 293.

4. Susan Sontag, On Photography. (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977): 79. Mary Bergstein, "Introductory Essay," Art History Through the Camera's Lens, ed. Helene E. Roberts ([Langhorne, PA.]: Gordon and Breach, 1995): 11.

5. Trevor Fawcett, "Graphic Versus Photographic in the

Nineteenth-Century Reproduction," Art History 9, no. 2 (June 1986): 200.

6. Quoted in "Photography of the Visual Arts, 1839-1880: Part I:" 304.

7. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844 [i.e. 1844-1846]) Issued in 6 parts., 29 June 1844-23 April 1846.

8. Fawcett, op.cit., 186.

9. Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial

Photography in Paris, 1848-1871 (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 1994): 269. 10. Talbot's calotype process involved the production of a

negative from which a positive image could be printed out on salted paper. These salted paper prints are often referred to as

calotypes. The process continued in use until superseded by albumen printing in the 1850s. "Photography, Processes and

Materials: Glossary," Grove Dictionary of Art Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed 7 January 2003). http:/ /www.groveart.com

11. John Hannavy, "Roger Fenton and the British Museum," History of Photography 12, no. 3 (July-September 1988): 193-204.

12. Hamber, Anthony, "Photography of the Visual Arts, 1839-1880: Part II," Visual Resources 6, no. 1 (1989-90): 25.

13. Ibid., 26.

14. Ibid., 31.

15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 26.

17. Wolfgang M. Freitag, "Early Uses of Photography in the

History of Art," Art Journal 39, no. 2 (Winter 1979/1980): 122. 18. Bergstein, "Introductory Essay," op.cit., 17.

19. Joseph Gantner, ed. Jakob Burckhardt und Heinrich

Woelf?in: Briefwechsel und andere Dokumente ihrer Begegnung 1882-1897 (Basel: Schwabe, 1989): 114. For more on this topic see Freitag, op.cit., 117-123.

20. The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh (Boston, MA: Bulfinch Press/ Little, Brown and Company, 2000), I: 16.

21. Julie K. Brown, Making Culture Visible: the Public Display of Photography at Fairs, Expositions, and Exhibitions in the United

States, 1847-1900 (Australia, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic

Publishers, c. 2001): 152-153. 22. Fawcett, op.cit., 191.

References

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Principal Artists and their Works with an Index of Places. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932.

Brown, Julie K. Making Culture Visible: the Public Display of Photography at Fairs, Expositions, and Exhibitions in the United States, 1847-1900. Australia; Amsterdam: Harwood Academic

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Freeman, Carla Conrad. "Visual Media in Education: An Informal

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Gantner, Joseph, ed. Jakob Burckhardt und Heinrich Woeljflin: Briefwechsel und andere Dokumente ihrer Begegnung 1882-1897. 2., erw. Aufl. Basel: Schwabe, 1989.

Hamber, Anthony. "The Photography of the Visual Arts, 1839 1880: Part I." Visual Resources 5, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 289-310.

-"The Photography of the Visual Arts, 1839-1880: Part II." Visual Resources 6, no. 1(1989/1990): 19-41.

-"The Photography of the Visual Arts, 1839-1880: Part III." Visual Resources 6, no. 2 (1989): 165-179.

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Lambert, Susan. The Image Multiplied: Five Centuries of Printed

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McCauley, Elizabeth Anne. Industrial Madness: Commercial

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12 Art Documentotion ? Volume 22, Number 1 ? 2003

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