Keywords

• Photographs are material objects that exist in space and time
• endowed with a biography in large part transacted within the archive. So the archive is not only the place in which photographs are preserved
• but also the one in which this biography can be restored to them. For this to happen
• there needs to be a shift from the utilitarian approach based on the content of the photographic document to a broader understanding of the functional context of its provenance
• production and sedimentation. In the archives
• memory is not simply kept alive
• but constantly shaped and reshaped
• creating multiple narratives that always remain open and subject to revision. In this process of epistemic sedimentation and formation
• archivists play an active role
• whether consciously or not. This approach
• conjugating theory and practice of photography and photographic archives
• is applied to a group of photographs from the Gustav Ludwig bequest in the Florentine Photothek. The photographs presented here
• whose card mounts
• stamps
• inscriptions etc. are an integral part
• provide us with a rare glimpse into the mental and visual 'laboratory' of an art historian and an exceptional opportunity to reconstruct his daily routine &ndash
• demonstrating at the same time the epistemological potential of photo archives of reproductions of works of art