War, Warburg And The World War I Press Photos

By Leão Serva

This book is a new study on an unknown collection of war photos of the WW1 found in the Warburg Institute Archive in London. The photos were gathered by Aby Warburg (1866-1929), years before his famous unfinished work “Mnemosyne Atlas of Images”. The collection was found in the Warburg Archive in 2004 and has been little studied since then. With the support of Capes (Agency of the Brazilian Ministry of Education), the author carried out research on the photos and produced a catalogue of the collection. Based on this work, he clearly identified Warburg’s participation in the composition of the collection, from beginning to end, ruling out the hypothesis that the late German iconologist had no relation with the set of images.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clube de Autores
• Release date: May 14, 2020

Book preview

WAR, WARBURG AND THE WORLD WAR I PRESS PHOTOS

The Press Photography Collection of World War I in the Warburg Archive: report of a research¹

Leão Serva

London, July 2017

1 Research conducted in the Archive of the Warburg Institute in two phases (January 2015 and between March and July 2017), with a scholarship grant from the CAPES agency (Brazilian Ministry of Education), as part of the development of a PhD in Communication and Semiotics at the Pontifical Catholic University in São Paulo (PUC-SP), under the supervision of Prof. Norval Baitello Jr. of PUC-SP and co-supervision Dr. Claudia Wedepohl of the Warburg Institute Archive.

1. BEGIN THE BEGINNING

In 2004, during an internal relocation at the headquarters of the Warburg Institute in London, the Warburg Archive team found in a few envelopes a set of uncatalogued documents that until then were completely unknown to the researchers: a collection of about 1,550 photographs of the First War, predominantly journalistic, covering the period from the beginning of the conflict in 1914 to the near end (with images of soldiers commemorating the ceasefire in front seats) in 1918. They are images produced in the most different areas where the Austrian and Germans fought (with rare exceptions, with pictures from other places). The War Photography Collection surprised the archival researchers and to this day few scholars have looked into it.

In the Warburg Archive, after being found at that opportunity shortly after 2004, the photos were packaged in three cardboard boxes divided into two piles in each box. The collection received the general code IV.64.Zeitgeschichte plus a (continued) indicating that it is a multi-part material; each box was named specifically with a letter A, B, and C. Therefore, the boxes are:

IV.64.Zeitgeschichte (continued) A;

IV.64.Zeitgeschichte (continued) B;

e IV.64.Zeitgeschichte (continued) C.

The photographs distributed by the three boxes are, for the most part, stamped on the back with alphanumeric index codes (one letter and up to four digits). The photos in box A also have a handwritten number on the back with pencil. There is, therefore, in this box a variety of indexing codes, often superimposed.

The photo boxes, in numbers:

The photos in box A are:

545 photographs, covering the period from the beginning of 1917 to March of 1918. In it prevail the alphanumeric codes initiated with the letter T plus four digits, being:

22 images arranged at the beginning, without a stamp and with manuscript numbers from 1 to 22;

other photos have alphanumeric code beginning with the letter T and four digits, from T3331 to T5082 (there are large numbering jumps, which explain the disparity between alphanumeric codes and number of photographs).

In that box, the photos contain the handwritten numbering in pencil on the back, beginning with the number 1 in the first photo originally placed on the left stack of the box (containing the number stamped T4848) and continuing to number 539 (photo stamped T3337), in the last photo of the right stack. Only six photos do not contain this handwritten numbering: photos T4004, T4722, T4914, T5002, T5004 and T5082². There are two non-localized handwritten numbers (253 and 455), which probably do not exist because between photos 252 and 254 (with alphanumeric codes T4260 and T4258) there is a 251A, apparently to correct the numbering defect; and between 454 and 456, alphanumeric codes are sequenced (T3651 and T3650), suggesting that there was a jump in handwritten numeration.

The pictures in box B are:

587 photographs, covering the period between mid-1915 and early 1917. In it, alphanumeric codes beginning with the letter A and four digits predominate:

521 photos, starting with A1023 to A3054;

55 photos with numerical code without initial letter, from 3181 to 3311 plus 3314 and 3316; and

11 photos with alphanumeric code with the letter T, from T3312 to T3330.

There is an exact continuity of themes and materiality between the non-lettered and the following photos, beginning with the letter T, which suggests that they are photographs of the same sequence, as if the author of the stamps had stopped putting the initial letter in certain Number of photos. As there are frequent jumps in the numbering of the collection, one might even wonder if there could have originally been a continuity between A3054 and 3181 (with the interruption of the use of the letter A at some point in this interval and the beginning of the use of the letter T in 3312).

The photos in box C are:

417 images, covering the period from the beginning of the war in September 1914 to mid-1915. In it, the alphanumeric code begins with the letter A (364 photographs) but at the beginning there is a set of nine photographs with an alphanumeric code beginning with the letter D, where:

39 unnumbered images with a stamp, composed of a bound album with 10 postcards; a sheet of 16 postage stamps related to the War; and 13 postcards released with war-related images;

9 photos stamped on the back with alphanumeric code beginning with letter D (from D1 to D11, missing D8 and D9 photos);

One unnumbered photograph, filed in the same plastic envelope as the A930 photo;

368 photographs stamped with an alphanumeric code beginning with letter A, from A2 to A999 (missing photo A1 and, as in the other boxes, there are large numbering jumps, which explain the disparity between alphanumeric codes and the number of photographs);

By the criterion³ adopted and the count made, are therefore 1,549 images that compose the collection of press photographs of World War I, of the Warburg Archive.

The confusing multiplicity of codes found suggests that the images have been subjected to different phases and / or sources of indexing. This is particularly clear in box A, where almost all photographs are given two codes: stamped, with alphanumeric indexing consisting of letter T and a four-digit number; and, annotated with pencils, a numbering from 1 to 539. It strengthens the conviction of different and independent indexing phases the fact that the progression of one code is the reverse of the other: in the same set of photos, the numbering in pencil grows while the alphanumeric decreases: the photo T4150 has the manuscript number 288; photo T4149 is pencil numbered 289; T4148 is 290, T4147 is 291 and so on. But there are gaps in the two counts, larger in the stamped than in the manuscript (in this, in fact, only a few units are missing), suggesting losses of originals at different times. This results in incoherent pairs: the photo number T3700 (450 numbers smaller than the T4150) is the number 433 (145 numbers larger than the 288).

In addition to the confusing aspect of the numbers, the loss or absence of photos that may have been part of the collection seems to be clear also because of the existence of cardboard cards between the piles of photos of the B box, which contain on one hand hand-written numbers with black ink pen, with the following numbers marked: 1-999; 1000-1999; 2000-2999, 3000-3999 and 4000-4999, suggesting that in the interval between each of these cards one day there must have been (or was expected to be) up to a thousand photos with numerals of those intervals, which does not occur with any of them (although the first digit may correspond to that of the card, there are substantially fewer photographs in the space between each). It is plausible that the numbers written on the cards corresponded to an existing set of photos since the alphanumeric codes accompany those numbers on the cards, albeit with great leaps. The largest number written on one card is 4999 and there are photos whose alphanumeric code started with the letter T have numbers just over 5000 (three photos: T5002, T5004 and T5082).

On the back of some of these cards are pencil notes with names of countries, probably war fronts: 1000-1999 corresponds to Osterreich-Balkan (Austria-Balkans in German) and Osterreich-Italien (Austria-Italy); 2000-2999, England-Deutschland (England-Germany). The card with the numbers 1-999, which is in box C, although it has no region indication, is immediately followed by a small album of detachable postcards