Source, evidence, sensitive object

Sometimes they solve a complicated case, sometimes they throw up new mysteries. Sometimes they are evidence of a robbery, sometimes the last testimony of a murdered person’s life: the importance of photographs in provenance research is the subject of the German Lost Art Foundation’s annual conference, to be held on 18 and 19 April 2024 at Bibliotheca Albertina, Leipzig University Library with around 180 registered participants.

“One of the challenges involved in provenance research is coming to grips with the value of photographs as a source – the fact that they hold the promise of truth yet also offer the possibility of manipulation,” says Gilbert Lupfer, Executive Chairman of the German Lost Art Foundation. “And yet critical debate surrounding the use of photographs is much less intense and broad than that it is in connection with written sources. Our annual conference in Leipzig seeks to change this situation.”

At the conference entitled Provenienzforschung und Fotografie [Provenance Research and Photography], some 30 scholars will make presentations on such aspects as how photographs can be a factor in the search for looted cultural property – even though they may once have served an entirely different purpose. Whether private snapshots or photographs contained in administrative files: this type of visual material can be a valuable source of information for us today in investigating art collections seized during the Nazi era. Discriminatory photographs taken to demonstrate “racial theory” can shed light on the fate of persecuted individuals, while rare photographs from private art dealerships tell of the endangered niche existence led by collectors and dealers in the GDR who preferred to remain under the state’s radar.

But photographs require critical scrutiny, too. What do historical photographs show and what do they conceal? What power relations are to be detected in the way colonial officials or archaeologists view countries, inhabitants and objects through the camera lens? How is it possible to present testimonies of violence today without depriving the victims of their dignity yet again? And finally, the photograph as an item of cultural property itself raises a difficult question: how can a reproducible, digitally storable image be restituted?

For the full programme along with abstracts and CVs of the speakers, see https://kulturgutverluste.de/en/termine/Konferenz2024   

The conference will take place on an in-person basis but will also be broadcast live on the German Lost Art Foundation’s YouTube channel, where it can be followed via this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPVuQT1sKLw. A recording will be made to document the event, and this will be available to access afterwards.

To coincide with the conference, the Foundation is dedicating its periodical Provenance & Research to the topic of photographs in 2023. This can be ordered from Sandstein Verlag Dresden (print edition) and is also available in open access as a free electronic edition on perspectivia.net at https://doi.org/10.25360/01-2023-00043. In addition, a number of articles on the topic of ‘provenance research and photography’ have been posted on the Foundation’s blog.

The German Lost Art Foundation in Magdeburg, founded on 1 January 2015 by the Federal Government, the German federal states and the leading municipal associations, is the central point of contact in Germany for questions concerning unlawfully seized cultural property. The Foundation receives institutional funding from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media; this is also the source of funding for its projects. The Foundation’s main focus is on cultural property seized under National Socialism as a result of persecution, especially Jewish property. Its fields of activity also include Cultural Goods and Collections from Colonial Contexts, items relocated as a result of war, and cultural property confiscation that took place in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR.

German Lost Art Foundation
Foundation under civil law
Humboldtstr. 12 | 39112 Magdeburg
Germany
phone: +49 (0) 391 727 763 35
e-mail: presse@kulturgutverluste.de