Definición y tipos de competitividad

The two archives explored in this article were chosen in part because they represent the crucial function of photography in visual cultural scholarship.

One is the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Library, which forms part of the University of London’s Warburg Institute, and the other is the Conway Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Both collections belong to specialist university institutes and are located within a 20-minute walk of each other.

Their respective host institutions have enjoyed a ‘special relationship’ going back to the 1930s, which includes co-publishing the highly regarded Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, as well as the frequent migration of students and staff between the two institutes. It is safe to assume that the photographic collections have catered for many of the same researchers;

yet the two archives differ profoundly in their approaches to the orders of archival order, not least in their digital incarnations.

The Photographic Collection of the Warburg Library is an iconographic collection of approximately 350,000 items, which primarily supports study and research in cultural history, art history and the history of ideas, with a particular emphasis on the Renaissance. The collection, like the book library, has its origins in the material collected by Aby Warburg (1866–1929) in connection with his research into the afterlife (Nachleben) of Antiquity in Western civilisation. Warburg organized his library according to four main categories – Image, Word, Orientation and Action – to reflect his ideas on the development of human consciousness and culture:

In other words the Library was to lead from the visual image, as the first stage in human’s awareness (Image), to language (Word) and then to religion, science and philosophy, all of them products of humanity’s search for Orientation which influences patterns of behaviour and actions, the subject matter of history (Action). (The Warburg Institute, 2012a: np)

The open-stack library is furthermore specifically designed to facilitate the making of intuitive connections. As Carlo Ginzburg (2012: 84–85) explains, in a recent essay on the Warburg Library: ‘Only a short walk separates the section on «Magic» from the section on «Science»: a contiguity that played a central role in Warburg’s approach.’ This approach is famously crystallized in the principle of ‘the good neighbour’, which dictates that the book you will really find useful is often sitting next to the one you are looking for (Saxl, 1970: 327; Steinberg, 2012: 128). In order to encounter these good neighbours, readers must by necessity be able to browse the holdings by themselves, rather than rely on ordering material from closed storage via the intermediary of a librarian. The Photographic Collection at the Warburg is organized on the same principle, although its thematic classification system differs somewhat from the categories of the book library. The ‘unique filing system’ was developed by Rudolf Wittkower in the 1930s and, according to the Warburg website, it was designed especially to enable researchers to: ‘identify the subjects of obscure works’; ‘locate images whose artist is unknown’; ‘understand the frequency with which stories were depicted’; ‘analyze the relationship of images to textual sources’; ‘trace iconographic developments through time’, and ‘test theories about the social functions of images’ (Warburg Institute, 2012c).

The main subject headings include ‘Secular iconography’, ‘Antiquities’,

‘Ritual’, ‘Gods and Myths’, ‘Magic and Science’, ‘Social Life’ and ‘Religious Iconography’, and items classified into each category are stored in folders which in turn are kept in banks of filing cabinets labelled with the relevant keywords. Just as the Warburg Library has remained true to Aby Warburg’s ideas, and retained its peculiar classification system even as vast numbers of the world’s libraries have adopted universal standards (such as the Dewey system), so the photographic collection has kept Wittkower’s system despite the emergence of similar international standards in image collections (such as Iconclass).

The Conway Library, for its part, has been located within the Courtauld Institute of Art since the latter’s inception in 1932. Like the Warburg, it is named after its originator, Sir Martin Conway (1856–1937), who in addition to being an explorer and adventurer in the Victorian mould, was also holder of the first Chair in Art History at a British university, notably at Liverpool. A contemporary of Aby Warburg, Conway was fascinated by the opportunity afforded by photographic technology to map the global territories of art in an unprecedented way, allowing comparative studies of practically any artefact vis-à-vis another (Vestberg, 2009: 129). In many ways, he embodies the oft-quoted observation by Donald Preziosi (1989: 72), that ‘art history as we know it today is the child of photography’, in the sense that the medium has enabled ‘taxonomic ordering, and the creation of historical and genealogical narratives’ within the discipline. The collection of photographs Conway began assembling forms the core of what was to become the one-million-item-strong Conway Library, which specializes in photographic reproductions of architecture, sculpture and manuscripts. In contrast to the conceptual categories of the Warburg Collection, the Conway follows established ordering practices within the discipline of art history, as they have traditionally been enacted from museums to textbooks. This means that its items are organized first according to medium of original item (e.g.

Architecture, Sculpture or Manuscripts) and subsequently by century, then either by location (in the case of buildings), or school and artist (in the case of sculpture), or school and book type (in the case of manuscripts).

Unlike the Warburg Collection, which stores items in filing cabinets, the Conway stores its photographic material in red boxes which have rounded spines and sit on shelves, giving the appearance of outsize books, nicely in keeping with the collection’s designation as a ‘library’.

The photographic collections at both the Warburg and the Conway constitute archives of what Weinberger calls ‘the first order of order’

(Weinberger, 2007: 17). That is to say, they are collections made up of physical objects: objects which can only be in one location at any one time and which are therefore fixed in their place, as it were. Give or take the occasional duplicate or mislaid print, any given photographic reproduction is always found in the same folder or box, located in one specific drawer or on one particular shelf, and will not be found by anybody looking for it anywhere else. The traditional way to counteract this limitation on archives – whether they be libraries of books or collections of images – is to create a so-called ‘second order of order’ (p. 18) in the shape of various finding aids, typically catalogues or indexes, which contain information about the first-order objects. This information is usually recorded and stored in a different medium and separate from the objects themselves. Although these kinds of finding aids exist in both the Warburg and the Conway, in common with a number of image collections, neither collection has an exhaustive catalogue or index of all its items, in the way that a book library will have a complete catalogue of its volumes. Instead, the available metadata about each image tend to be recorded either on the back of the physical print or on the piece of card on which it has been mounted. So already we see that

Weinberger’s distinct orders of order in the physical world are disrupted by archival practice: the filing cabinets and boxes are, at one and the same time, repositories for the ‘things themselves’ and catalogues explaining what those things are. This is not the only feature of the Warburg and Conway collections to mark them out as composite archives of both the first and the second order. By virtue of being photographic collections, the very things of which they are made up are always already indexical references to other, pre-existing objects-in-the-world. In addition to being an archival object in its own right, every photograph is in this respect also a mini-archive within the archive. The third aspect of these two collections which endows their first-order manifestations with second-order properties is a result of what we might call their originating discourses. That is to say, aside from providing visual documentation for studies in art and cultural history, each archive is also a resource for studying what Kelley Wilder (2009: 127) has called

‘photography’s relationship with art history, or with archiving in general’.

In the case of the Conway, the genealogical and geographical bias of art history as a discipline requires researchers to anchor their inquiries to certain periods and places in order to know where to start looking in the vast collection. In the case of the Warburg, a different approach is needed. Since it is explicitly an iconographic collection, it is an archive where the classification of each image is based not so much on a denotative description of its contents or its time and place of origin, as on a connotative interpretation of its motif. To give an example, a picture showing a naked man’s body pierced by arrows is likely to be classified under ‘Religious Iconography – Saints A–Z – Sebastian – Martyred’ because to an art or cultural historian the visual elements of such an image will virtually always add up to a representation of the martyrdom of St Sebastian. Somebody attempting to search the Warburg Collection equipped only with what Erwin Panofsky (1970[1939]: 54) would have called a ‘pre-iconographical’

conception of their subject – someone wanting illustrations of people shot by arrows, for example – would have no idea of where to start looking.

On the other hand, a researcher going to the Conway looking specifically for representations of St Sebastian would not get far without having first some idea of either what kinds of churches, in which part of the world, would be likely to incorporate images of this saint, or of which sculptors, working in which period, might conceivably have treated this subject. In both respects, the ability to navigate collections such as the Warburg and the Conway requires that researchers come already equipped with a certain amount of metadata – a kind of mental index, if you like. The more detailed the metadata – the more in-depth the iconographic or historical knowledge of the researchers, in other words – the better their chances of finding what they are looking for.

Clearly both the physical organization and conceptual classification of the Warburg Collection’s contents are designed to enable the answering of questions arising from iconographical concerns, questions asked by people with some specialist knowledge of cultural history. Similarly, the layout

and classification system of the Conway are first and foremost designed to be of use to trained historians of art. What is more, anybody with a question to which they think that either of these collections might have the answer would have to take themselves in person to the archives and rifle through drawers and boxes – a fact which in itself will severely limit the kind of person likely to consult the archives and the kind of inquiry they might be pursuing. This is all in keeping with Weinberger’s postulations on the limitations of first- and second-order archives. But what would happen if the Warburg Photographic Collection and the Conway Library went online? Might they attract different kinds of researchers, and find new potential uses for their images, in the virtual world of the third, so-called miscellaneous order?