Lecture hall with audience
Nazi-looted cultural property
Colonial contexts
Wartime losses
Soviet zone / GDR

Aid or cultural asset in its own right?

Conference report on the 2024 annual conference of the German Lost Art Foundation: Provenance Research and Photography, 18/19 April in Leipzig
Christoph Rippe

The annual conference of the German Lost Art Foundation took place on 18/19 April 2024 at Bibliotheca Albertina, Leipzig University Library. Over the course of the two days, 26 experts presented their research relating to the multiple links between provenance research and photography. In the run-up to the conference, contributions were published on the Foundation’s blog and in an issue of the periodical Provenance & Research.

In his keynote speech, Jens Jäger began with cross-contextual reflections on the historical conditions of photographic practice, the possibilities and limitations of photographic history in connection with National Socialist and colonial history, and the necessity of digitisation to enable research. After this, ten of the talks dealt mainly with the context of the National Socialist regime, eight addressed colonial contexts, and one focussed on the private art trade in the GDR.

One especially noticeable point was that contributions on National Socialist and GDR contexts were primarily concerned with research into works of art, with photography serving as evidence of their historical presence. Only two contributions focussed on photographs of Jewish people that would seem to have originally served documentary or scholarly purposes. By contrast, examples from colonial contexts related solely to photographs of people, with the exception of one talk on photographs taken during archaeological excavations.

Divided into five thematic areas, the talks addressed the topic of “provenance research and photography” based firstly on questions relating to historical context and secondly geared towards the material circumstances of the photographs themselves:

(1) How can photographs be used as source material for provenance research today? Agnes Matthias started by providing another broad introduction, explaining for instance how photographs are useful for tracing the path of depicted objects despite being associated with contexts of injustice. One example here was the idea of examining negatives, since these sometimes capture important information in the margins that was cropped in the printed version. Lisa Frank showed how historical periods can be linked by comparing photographs in which the same objects appear, and how even calendars and newspapers depicted in photographs can be used for dating purposes. Ulrike Lötzsch and Kristina Scheelen-Nováček drew on three examples in an attempt to reconstruct the historical anatomical collection at the University of Jena as a way of demonstrating the ethical complexity of researching, preserving and presenting human remains from both European and non-European contexts.

(2) How were photographs used in different historical periods and how did these different uses shape the unique characteristics of photographs in each era? Adrian Lindner showed the diachronic uses of a photograph of the Indonesian anti-colonial fighter Demang Lehman. One of the topics addressed in the talk given by Claudia Müller and Toni Hanel was how it was possible to gain additional information on the art trade in the GDR by involving the population of Dresden (Contemporary witnesses wanted!) and making methodical use of photographs in doing so. Finally, Marco Rasch discussed the possibilities of provenance research as enabled by the photographic collections at Marburg Photographic Archive which are linked to the “art protection campaigns” during the two world wars. Here, too, the question arose as to how photographs could be contextualised by putting them online and addressing the public.

(3) What is sensitive image content and what makes images themselves sensitive objects? The three contributions by Lisa Hilli, Alina Bothe and Lisa Paduch (#lastseen Bildatlas) and by Margit Berner (e.g. Der kalte Blick [The Cold Eye]) looked into the apparent contradiction of how it might be possible to reconcile the general demand for transparency of photographic collections with methods of presentation that are ethically responsible. Similar to the endeavours of provenance research itself, the three contributions attempted to explore relationships between the people depicted and their descendants. One of the issues that ultimately emerged here was how to deal with the emotions that this dilemma can give rise to.

(4) The opening contribution and the first panel of the second day focused on collections based on the concept and practice of the archive, with contributors primarily outlining structural overviews of photographic archives and their relevance to provenance research: Christian Fuhrmeister, Cosima Dollansky and Lena Schneider for the Central Institute of Art History in Munich, Birgit Sporleder for the National Museums in Berlin, Nathalie Neumann on various art historical collections in France, Dagmar Thesing and Miriam Cockx on Cologne image archives, Katharina Hüls-Valenti on the archives of the Italian export authorities (cf. 3Sat documentary), and last but not least Lucia Halder on the image archive of the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, a museum of ethnography in Cologne.

(5) Finally, the four contributions of the last panel focussed on issues of how to deal with photographs in the present day. It should be noted that all speakers at the conference showed a high degree of ethical sensitivity by providing advance notice of potentially disturbing images and cutting these out in the live stream. In addition to Alona Dubova’s and Andrea Bambi’s examination of the restitution of photographs, this panel also included Stefanie Schien’s discussion of curatorial approaches to photographs in exhibitions. Julia Richard presented ways of artistically re-appropriating photographs, a topic previously addressed by Lucia Halder.

There was consensus among the speakers on something that has become an increasingly established view over the last twenty years, namely that photographs – whether analogue or digital – always have a material basis and a biography of their own. As Agnes Mathias put it in her introduction, photographs can ultimately serve as a discursive impetus (the photograph as a source in general) and be objects of research themselves (photographs as items for return and restitution), and they can also be used as “Wanted!” images for other objects (the photograph as a “substitute” for the work of art itself).

In all these instances photographs can have sensitive qualities, such as when they depict sacred objects, when they are anthropometric images, or when they depict dead people. In addition to obviously inhumane depictions such as images of enslavement, imprisonment, torture, illness and disrobing, there are also those that can only be identified as sensitive based on a precise analysis of their context. Presenters such as Margit Berner pointed out that for several decades now, ethical concerns have been a factor in connection with anthropological photographs from Europe, too, and the public engagement with such images in exhibitions. During the discussions on panels 1, 3 and 5, issues emerged regarding not just the emotional handling of sensitive photos but also questions of how to talk and write about photographs and how to present them. According to most speakers, formalised ethical guidelines are difficult to create since individual constellations of photos, stakeholders and affected parties require different approaches.

Ultimately, various interconnected themes emerged during the conference. In presentations on National Socialist contexts, human destinies were primarily depicted through relationships with objects, while in colonial contexts this mainly happened through direct depictions of the individuals affected. As such, most of the presenters focused on the provenances of the objects depicted in the photographs or the extent to which the genealogies of the persons depicted could be reconstructed, but often not with the provenances of the photographs themselves. This led to a distinction being drawn between photography as an aid (research source and tool) on the one hand, and as the central object of research on the other. Approaches to the latter with photographs as the focus of restitution efforts were offered by Alona Dubova for colonial contexts and Andrea Bambi for a case concerning the Jewish family of the photographer Aenne Biermann (cf. ARD documentary). One aspect that was lacking from the conference was examples of the use of photographs as sources for provenance research into museum objects from colonial contexts, although Jens Jäger did go into this aspect in some detail in his introduction. For further information on these topics, see the accompanying issue of Provenance & Research.

In his closing remarks, German Lost Art Foundation Director Gilbert Lupfer noted that more dialogue between National Socialist and colonial contexts would be highly desirable since there are both similarities and differences between these areas. For both areas, presenters repeatedly pointed out that significantly more financial resources are needed not just for the indexing and digitisation of image collections but also for the development of strategies to present them – and ultimately for the necessary staffing to put this into practice.

The conference was concluded with a workshop on the collection, use and presentation of (working) photographs documenting provenance features such as stamps and inscriptions of all kinds (given by Nadine Kulbe of Saxon State Library, Dresden State and University Library, and Stephan Kummer of Berlin Central and State Library). Based on the fact that the term “metadata” originally stems from library practice, such conventional practical formats would be useful points of comparison between the disciplines of library science, art history, natural sciences and ethnology. This would shed light not only on the subject-specific conventions of the original analogue inscriptions of metadata, but also on their interpretation by provenance researchers in the same disciplines today.

As such, it is necessary to arrive at a better mutual understanding of the established vocabulary of provenance-related terms between the disciplines and media. For example, discourse in the National Socialist context often uses the legal term “community of heirs”, while the increasingly criticised term “society of origin” is still frequently used across the board for colonial contexts (cf: the term “source community”, occasionally also translated into German as Ursprungsgesellschaft etc.). One of the differences is that the former see themselves as a community of interests within an established legal jurisdiction, while representatives of the Nama in Namibia today, for example, do not necessarily represent shared political and legal interests. The medium of photography likewise demands more complex descriptions of its actors and their practices. As photographers, representatives of the National Socialist regime or colonisers are also producers and are therefore linked more closely to the provenance of photographs than is the case when three-dimensional objects are transferred.

To find recordings of all contributions, the complete programme and a booklet, see the event documentation.

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Bibliotheca Albertina of the university library Leipzig