50 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas: On Photography, Archives, and the

Afterlife of Images

by Molly Kalkstein

In 1923, following his release from the Bellevue Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen,

Switzerland, where he had spent three years in treatment for depression
and schizophrenia, the German art historian Aby Warburg began work on
the great culminating project of his career. Warburg intended the Bilderatlas
Mnemosyne [Mnemosyne Atlas], as it has come to be called, to synthesize his
previous scholarship and crystallize his theories about the migration and
repetition of “images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power”
from the art and culture of Western antiquity through the Renaissance, and
up through his own day.1 Although Warburg is often credited with found-
ing the study of iconology, later promulgated in the United States by his
disciple Erwin Panofsky, the movement and impact of images he hoped to
demonstrate through the Mnemosyne Atlas had a much deeper psychological
inflection. As Warburg explained, his program was an attempt “to point to
the function of collective memory as a formative force for the emergence of
styles by using the civilization of pagan antiquity as a constant.”2
Notoriously ambitious and elusive, and left unfinished at the time
of Warburg’s death, the Mnemosyne Atlas comprised a numbered series of
black cloth-covered screens on which Warburg would arrange and rearrange
groupings of black and white gelatin silver photographs, comprising nearly
one thousand images in all. The photographs reproduced works of high art,
maps, cosmographical images, manuscript pages, and were in some instanc-
es interspersed with contemporary newspaper clippings and advertisements
(Fig. 1). Warburg selected these images from his own library, and specifically
from his photographic collection, which, Katia Mazzucco proposes, he spe-
cifically assembled to support this project.3 Warburg intended each panel to
demonstrate a particular theme or argument, many details of which are still
being parsed. Warburg summarized Panel 77, shown in Figure 1, for exam-
ple, rather obliquely as “the catharsis of the ‘headhunter’ having taken the
form of a golfer.”4 Its contents comprise, as Christopher Wood describes it,

an irregular constellation embracing Medea about to Kill Her Children

and The Massacre at Chios by Delacroix, modern photographs of golf-
ers, two Greek coins, the cover of a fish cookbook, postage stamps
from France and Barbados, an advertisement for a beauty cream, and
a seal presenting Charles II of England as Neptune.5
51 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

Fig. 1. Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne [Mnemosyne Atlas], Panel 77, 1929,
digital positive from glass plate negative, 9 1/2 x 7 in. (23.7 x 17.7 cm). Warburg
Institute Archive, London. © The Warburg Institute.
52 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

Wood, like many other scholars, is quick to admit that many of the meanings
that Warburg ascribed to his aggregations of images remain enigmatic to this
day.
Warburg intended to publish the completed Atlas as separate vol-
umes of plates and text, but the extant version consists only of photographs
of the individual panels in different iterations (there were supposed to have
been at least 79 in all), the draft of an introduction, and an archive of notes
and working materials. Despite, or more likely because of, both its idiosyn-
cratic methodology and eternal state of incompletion, the ultimate form and
meaning of the Atlas have been extensively debated. Ernst Gombrich’s 1970
publication Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography fostered significant inter-
est in Warburg, and Atlas scholarship in particular has picked up consider-
able steam from the 1990s onward.6 Although Warburg was for many de-
cades a relatively obscure figure within the discipline of art history—despite
the fame of his library, now housed at the Warburg Institute in London, to
which it was moved in 1933—recent scholars have come to find the Mnemo-
syne Atlas a compelling and versatile touchstone, one whose approach seems
only to have grown in relevance. Indeed, this article will not be primari-
ly concerned with the many detailed analyses of Warburg’s art historical
arguments, but will instead take its cue from scholarship that emphasizes
the Mnemosyne Atlas’s material qualities, structure, and legibility as a visual,
intellectual, and imaginative object. I am especially interested in what Emily
Verla Bovino has referred to as the Nachleben [afterlife] of the Atlas and its
emergence as an Idealstil [idea style], as evinced by the many exhibitions,
digital projects, and other experiments that take the Atlas as their starting
point.7 As Bovino notes (but does not necessarily endorse), there is a sense
among some scholars that the explosion of interest in the Atlas has resulted
in both a loss of aura and its dilution as a scholarly object, in tandem with
its ascendance as an aestheticized metonym for disparate practices of assem-
blage, montage, and “idiosyncratic free play with the juxtaposition of imag-
es.”8 I would argue, however, that this so-called afterlife of the Mnemosyne
Atlas is very much in keeping with both Warburg’s original project and with
its ultimate impossibility as a finished undertaking. Further, as the growing
body of scholarship continues to suggest that the Atlas has in some sense
come home, historiographically speaking, its resonance with contemporary
discussions about the migration of digital images (especially digital photo-
graphs) and both the limitations and possibilities of digital archives remains
to be developed. The movement and transformation of images, the special
technological significance of photographs, and the fecundity of the archive
are all key to Warburg’s project, as well as to our increasingly networked,
image-laden digital culture. In this article, then, I begin by outlining a nec-
essarily selective historiography of both early conceptions of the structural
qualities of the Mnemosyne Atlas and subsequent scholarship that contextu-
53 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

alizes it vis-à-vis the atlas format more broadly.9 I then consider the Atlas’s
peculiar relationship to photography, and, finally, examine it in dialogue
with recent scholarship about digital images and archives. What ultimately
becomes clear is that, having left the Atlas in an incomplete, contradictory,
and specifically pictorial form, Warburg gave his project the space to carry
out its own thesis, and to anticipate technological developments and cultural
discourses that are only now coming into focus.

Early Historiography

The question of how, exactly, to interpret the Mnemosyne Atlas is one that
has both beleaguered and fascinated researchers since Warburg’s death,
starting with the two most intensely vested members of his circle, Fritz Saxl
and Gertrud Bing, as well as Austrian art historian Ernst Gombrich.10 In
these early years following the evacuation of Warburg’s library and archive
from Hamburg, Saxl and Bing were firmly intent on producing a finalized,
published version—in English,
no less—of the Atlas. This project
never approached completion, but
illustrates recurring attempts by
Warburg’s disciples to wrestle the
Atlas into submission by pruning
many of its more idiosyncratic
qualities.
One product of this attempt
was known as the Geburtstagsatlas
[Birthday Atlas], a personal edition
of the Mnemosyne Atlas present-
ed to Warburg’s younger brother
Max for his birthday in 1937. As
Mazzucco explains, this revised
version of the Atlas, although not
itself intended for publication,
reveals Bing and Saxl’s vision for a
finalized iteration. She points out
that the Birthday Atlas, which was
based on (indeed directly clipped
Fig. 2. Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne from copies of) photographs of the
[Mnemosyne Atlas], Panel 24, 1929, digital last iteration of Warburg’s panels,
positive from glass plate negative, 9 1/2 x is primarily a revision of the Atlas’s
7 in. (23.7 x 17.7 cm). Warburg Institute Ar- layout and graphic presentation.11
chive, London. © The Warburg Institute.
The overall effect is noticeably
54 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

streamlined, with the resulting

panels containing fewer individual
images, each now neatly captioned,
more uniformly spaced, and more
consistent in size. Saxl and Bing
omitted Warburg’s characteristic
repetition of enlarged image de-
tails, and transmuted the vertical
arrangement of the original screens
into a horizontal orientation (Figs.
2 and 3).12 They also replaced the
black cloth of Warburg’s screens
with white backgrounds, and ex-
cised of most of the Atlas’s “eccen-
tric materials,” that is, the various
newspaper clippings and photo-
graphs, advertisements, and stamps
that only appeared in the versions
Warburg created just before his
death.13
Fig. 3. Aby Warburg, Geburtstagsatlas [Birth- The ultimate intent of these re-
day Atlas], Panel 24, 1937, collage of gelatin visions, Mazzucco suggests, was to
silver photographs on cardboard, 17 1/2 x exclude unfinished, unintelligible,
12 1/2 in. (44.3 x 31.6 cm). Warburg Institute
or otherwise undesirable aspects of
Archive, London. © The Warburg Institute.
Warburg’s work in progress. These
alterations attempt to produce a more legible edition of the Atlas, with a
thematic, linear sequence, rather than the “polyphony and anachronisms” of
Warburg’s own versions.14 It is especially significant, then, that later schol-
ars have explicitly pointed to Warburg’s use of contemporary, vernacular
materials as fundamental to his project. Charlotte Schoell-Glass, for exam-
ple, suggests that not only was the inclusion of such images art historically
unprecedented, but also that “if a unified theory of the ‘human memory of
images’ was to be devised, it could hardly be restricted to the art and culture
of the Renaissance.”15 The use of these materials thus acted as an important
test of the viability of Warburg’s entire thesis.
Despite the single-mindedness with which Warburg’s disciples
pursued their goal of publishing the Mnemosyne Atlas, by the time Ernst
Gombrich produced his Intellectual Biography in 1970 (both Saxl and Bing
having died years before), he was fully convinced of the “enormous techni-
cal and intrinsic difficulties” that made the project ultimately unachievable.16
Further, it was only by “leaving aside some of the digressions and episodes
to be found on the screens” that he was able to put forward even a top-level
overview of the Atlas’s structure.17 Indeed, it would seem that Gombrich’s
55 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

entire approach to Warburg’s oeuvre was marked by a conviction as to its in-

trinsic state of fragmentation, perhaps formed in part by his apparent shock
upon first confronting, as a young scholar, the unruly mass of Warburg’s
archive. In his introduction to the Intellectual Biography, Gombrich writes
that, as early as 1946, he was persuaded that “Warburg’s notes should not be
published so much as used in a presentation of his ideas.”18 Mazzucco press-
es the issue further, suggesting that Gombrich also attributed the disjointed-
ness of Warburg’s work directly to his struggle with the positivist scientific
culture that characterized his historical milieu. Warburg’s “ceaseless efforts,”
Gombrich wrote, “to grasp irrational experiences of mankind in rational
terms without killing…their essence makes up…for part of the sense of
tension and drama in his writings—more than that, it is mainly responsible
for the inherent fragmentary character of his very work.”19 Throughout the
Intellectual Biography, Gombrich emphasizes Warburg’s unpublished notes at
the expense of his finished articles (of which, admittedly, there are relatively
few). His perception of Warburg’s scholarship as incomplete is also evident
in the ongoing project to streamline the Atlas, as outlined above. Although
Gombrich’s approach reflects a particular bias on the part of Warburg’s
successors, much criticized by later scholars, Mazzucco also suggests that
it created a “rather original overturning of hierarchy between the scientific
production that had been completed, and that which had been left incom-
plete.”20 This overturning of the standard scholarly order, prioritization of
the fragmentary over the completed work, and tension between scientific
positivism and the “irrational experiences” of memory and art, are threads
that also run through more recent examinations of the Mnemosyne Atlas.
They are particularly relevant to contemporary ideas about the atlas format
more generally.

The Atlas and Atlases

One of the most noteworthy contributions of later scholarship on the Atlas

is a growing tendency to examine it in conjunction with disciplines other
than art history per se. Benjamin Buchloh, for example, situates Warburg’s
project alongside examples of contemporary artworks—most notably Ger-
hard Richter’s Atlas—linked by a common strategy of amassing large col-
lections of photographs and presenting them in grid-like formations. For
Buchloh, these works represent a clearly related group, but also a class of
outliers within the recognized language of avant-garde art history and of
photography more specifically. “Neither the term collage nor photomontage,”
he writes, “adequately describe the apparent formal and iconographic
monotony of these panels or the vast archival accumulations of their materi-
als.”21 Unable to fully account for these works in strictly art historical terms,
56 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

Buchloh lights upon the visual strategies of the sciences—charts, diagrams,

technical illustrations, and the atlas—that have been used by artists starting
with the historical avant-garde, but whose often didactic qualities reside in
tension with these artists’ more common emphasis on shock and perceptual
rupture. Although the term atlas, along with its format, originated within
a largely (though not exclusively) positivist scientific framework, Buchloh
highlights its increasingly metaphorical usage by the early twentieth centu-
ry. His conception of the Mnemosyne Atlas as “the most important example
of this anti-positivist tendency” thus calls to mind the tension, described by
Gombrich, between the positivist underpinnings of Warburg’s scholarship
and his confrontation with the most fraught and irrational aspects of human
emotion and experience (not least within himself). Buchloh calls attention
to the displacement of a sequential model of history “by a focus on the
simultaneity of separate but contingent social frameworks and an infinity
of participating agents.”22 This displacement, he suggests, emerged from a
range of loosely affiliated artistic, literary, and historical practices that coin-
cided in the 1920s, including the Mnemosyne Atlas. Further, he sees this new
model—at least for the artistic avant-garde and for Warburg—as enmeshed
in an ongoing debate about the potential of photography and photographic
reproduction to reliably represent visual evidence, to construct (or demolish)
social memory, and to fundamentally liberate the circulation of and access to
visual information.
Other scholars have also taken up this notion that Warburg’s use of
the atlas format both drew on and radically diverged from positivist exam-
ples. Schoell-Glass points out that Warburg’s screens, and the lectures he
gave to explicate them, served not simply to illustrate but to test the ideas
that informed his project. Noting, like Buchloh, the atlas’s venerable history
as a scientific tool, she adds that Warburg himself likened the Mnemosyne
Atlas to a laboratory as well as, intriguingly, a seismograph to detect other-
wise imperceptible movement.23 Schoell-Glass also proposes that, generally
speaking, the function of an atlas is to “reduce the world and information
about it to the size of a book” whose contents can then be reorganized at
will. At the same time, she writes that an atlas works to fix or even “depoi-
son” its contents, such as the traumatic or pathos-laden gestures and sym-
bols on which Warburg focused.24 There seems to be a curious tension, then,
within the nature of the atlas, which at once reduces, unifies, and fixes, and
yet allows for perpetual recombination and reinterpretation—a migration
from motion to stillness and back again.
Ulrich Keller, meanwhile, examines the Mnemosyne Atlas in the
context of a more specific type of atlas: the art historical picture atlas.25
Again echoing Buchloh, Keller writes that Warburg’s decision to create his
culminating work in the form of a picture atlas signaled a break with the
increasingly hegemonic conception of art history as a linear progression, bol-
57 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

stered by the proliferation of paired photographic images in textbooks and

classrooms.26 Looking at the role of visual reproductions in the study of art
history, Keller characterizes the Mnemosyne Atlas as “grandly anachronistic,”
harkening back to an earlier visual model in which plates of images were as-
sembled and printed separately (often temporally as well as spatially) from
their explanatory texts.27 The picture atlas, Keller writes, produces a unique-
ly active reading and viewing experience when compared with that of the
streamlined illustrated textbook. For Keller, the prime example of the picture
atlas format, Séroux d’Agincourt’s early nineteenth-century L’Histoire de
l’Art par les monuments [History of Art by its Monuments], marks the first
time that images of geographically dispersed artworks were accumulated in
sufficient quantity that “it became possible to ‘play’ with them, to separate
them from their local moorings and reconfigure them under an historical
paradigm.”28 He proposes that the picture atlas in general, and the constant-
ly shifting montage of the Mnemosyne Atlas specifically, “banked on the gen-
erative force of gaps or Denkräume.” In other words, the interstices between
individual images, and between images and text, required of readers a set of
interpretive skills “honed in old-fashioned archival milieus.”29
This tension between positivism and ambiguity, science and art, has
also made the Atlas an irresistible model (or “idea style”) for scholars such
as Georges Didi-Huberman. In addition to writing about the origin of the
Mnemosyne Atlas in the trauma of the First World War and Warburg’s sub-
sequent psychiatric institutionalization, Didi-Huberman curated a series of
exhibitions that take the Atlas as their point of departure.30 These exhibitions
engaged both historical and contemporary artworks that resonate conceptu-
ally or methodologically with Warburg’s project. Didi-Huberman explicitly
characterizes the atlas form as abundant, provisional, and ultimately even
dangerous to the kind of positivist methodology from which it originally
sprang. The “tables” that make up an atlas, he writes playfully, function as
“a prop for a work that must always be taken up again, modified, or even
started again,” and the practice of montage, of bringing (literally mounting)
images together, is “a heuristics of thought itself.”31 The Mnemosyne Atlas,
having never been fixed by publication, would thus constitute the very
epitome of the form in Didi-Huberman’s conception. But while the tables
of Warburg’s Atlas could always be augmented and reconfigured, this very
inexhaustibility also suggests “the intrinsic madness of such a project.”32
And yet, Didi-Huberman continues, while we may admit the madness of the
project in one sense, we also recognize Warburg’s conviction that it is not the
images or forms themselves that should most concern us, but their move-
ment and transformation, as well as the spaces between them.
In the above examples, what becomes increasingly evident is the
flexible, even liminal position that scholars have ascribed to the atlas for-
mat. Although rooted in positivist conceptions of history and science, and
58 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

ostensibly charged with demonstrating a unified, coherent argument, the

atlas also offers itself as a potential space for interpretation, experimentation,
and even subversion. Warburg’s use of the format was already a reaction
against the ascendant art historical order, something it seems his immediate
successors had difficulty in accepting. The very anachronism of the Atlas’s
method echoes that of its content, in which images of widely dispersed
provenance—geographically, temporally, and conceptually—are pulled into
conversation within the unifying (but ultimately porous) frame of the atlas
panel. It is also worth considering the extent to which Warburg’s Atlas rep-
resents an extreme example of this apparent flexibility, rather than a charac-
teristic one. I will return to this point later on.

Photography, Gaps, (Im)possibility

As discussed above, Keller has convincingly argued that the emergence of

viable technologies for reproducing works of art enabled the development of
art history into the temporally oriented discipline with which we are now so
familiar. The picture atlas, Keller writes, dealt in abundance and generated
what he sees as productive gaps between image and text, between image
and referent (the original work of art), and between images themselves. The
proliferation of photography, halftone printing, and slide projection by the
turn of the twentieth century subsequently encouraged the sense that all
of these components had seamlessly fused, producing a linear, apparently
self-explanatory timeline of art history. What receded, meanwhile, was not
only the physical separation of image and text, and the interpretive disjunc-
ture between image and object, but the distance between viewer and author,
and the potential for viewers to engage in more activated forms of looking
and reading. The Mnemosyne Atlas, then, takes up a fraught but uniquely
productive position between the earlier picture atlas and the later art histor-
ical reliance on photomechanical reproduction. It seems clear that photog-
raphy was essential to Warburg’s project and that he used it in a way that
reinstituted the “generative force of gaps” to which Keller alludes.33 I would
argue as well that photography has been critical to the Atlas’s afterlife, and
to its imaginative force in more recent scholarship.

Between Image and Object

Keller asserts that art historical photographs quickly came to act as trans-
parent surrogates, giving viewers a sense of interacting directly with orig-
inal works of art.34 For Warburg, however, the relationship between image
and object appears rather more nuanced. Kurt Forster, for example, points
59 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

out that Warburg was summarily derisive of art historical connoisseurship,

regarding it as a kind of gourmandise “peculiar to the propertied classes,
the collector and his circle.”35 In fact, Warburg—who, as the scion of an
enormously wealthy banking family, used his financial resources to build
a library of books and images, but did not collect art—saw the ownership
of original objects as an actual deterrent to art historical analysis, because
the superficial appeal of physical possession often replaced true under-
standing.36 Meanwhile, Matthew Rampley, Gombrich, and others discuss
Warburg’s pervasive anxiety that modern technologies such as the tele-
graph were responsible for “the destruction of distance,” that is, the space
and time needed for detached reflection.37 This distance, Rampley further
points out, was for Warburg the very foundation of cultural progress.38
Keller, meanwhile, remarks on the material and qualitative diversity of the
photographs that Warburg used for his panels, differing not only in size and
tonality, but also in legibility. What these points suggest is that for Warburg,
photographic reproductions were preferable to original artworks as objects
of study, but did not act as direct surrogates. Their portability and manipu-
lability were crucial to Warburg’s methodology, but they also produced an
essential distance between the scholar and the work, and it was in this gap
that Warburg could carry out his analytical project. It was not important,
apparently, for Warburg’s photographs to capture the material subtleties of
the original object, since Warburg’s goal was to map the migration and social
impact of forms and symbols, not to parse the nuances of style or technique.
Although Warburg certainly intended his photographs to function as neu-
tral representations, they were ultimately imperfect ones, revealing, even
reveling in, their own failure to fully capture the materiality of the original
objects. Given the time period and Warburg’s working methods, black and
white photographs were his only viable option, but one wonders whether
Warburg might not have preferred them anyway, even if color versions had
been practical. In fact, we can see in the process of translation between the
original object and the gelatin silver photograph an echo of the way that
he perceived the transformation of images across space and time. Philippe-
Alain Michaud likewise suggests that photographic reproduction acts as a
process through which disparate objects are reduced and unified within the
space of Warburg’s screens, adding that the Atlas “does not limit itself to
describing the migrations of images through the history of representations; it
reproduces them.”39

Between Images

Meanwhile, ideas about the space around and between the images on each
of the Atlas’s panels have proven central to interpretations of the atlas for-
60 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

mat by not only Keller but also Didi-Huberman and Michaud. If the percep-
tual distance between the photograph and its object was essential for War-
burg to begin his analysis, then the distance between photographs and their
capacity for movement were equally important for the ongoing evolution of
his project. Didi-Huberman, as we have seen, argues that an atlas table is a
platform on which things happen, on which connections are made between
images, only to be unmade and considered anew. Michaud goes so far as to
describe the black cloth of the Atlas’s panels as a “conductive medium,” a
space across which resonances between the images are transmitted.40 Fur-
ther, it is only through their assemblage within the frame (the table) of the
Atlas that Warburg’s photographs come to express his particular ideas; it is
only in relationship to other photographs that they create and test the sub-
stance of his arguments. As Michaud writes, “within the panel, the fragment
has no separate existence; it is the specific representation of a general theme
running through every element.”41 Buchloh, for his part, emphasizes that
photography’s multiplicity and “capacity for serialization” play a crucial
role in the atlas projects he considers, and certainly the scope and iterative
nature of Warburg’s project rely heavily on photography’s reproducibility.42
Per Rumberg notes that Warburg frequently cut up the photographs of the
Atlas screens themselves in order to test new configurations on separate
sheets of paper.43 We see, then, that the migration and reconfiguration of
images, which were central to Warburg’s methods and arguments, depend-
ed on photography as a technology. Significantly, Warburg’s late inclusion
of contemporary images also extended the scope of the Atlas outside the
prescribed boundaries of art history, and into the future of photographic
mass media.

Between Image and Text, Between Viewer and Author

While the photographs of the Mnemosyne Atlas panels were an important

way for Warburg to document and compare different stages of his thinking,
these photographs are also the primary form in which we have inherited
the Atlas, and therefore the foundation on which all which all subsequent
scholarship rests. Warburg never intended for these photographs to carry
the weight of the entire project, but the texts that were to have explained
them exist in a state even more fragmentary and provisional than the imag-
es themselves. While we know that Warburg intended to publish the Atlas
in volumes of both plates and text, even Gombrich suggests that Warburg
hoped his argument could be conveyed solely through pictures.44 And while
Warburg may have appreciated the levelling effect and reproductive flexibil-
ity of black and white photography, it nonetheless functioned in his project
primarily as a transparent image vehicle. In part a belief in the medium’s
61 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

evidentiary power, Warburg’s hope also underscores his faith in the intrinsic
affective charge of the symbols he was presenting. Yet the Atlas panels as
they exist, as photographs of photographs (or more often digital or halftone
surrogates of the same) and as a set of contradictory iterations of a work in
progress, belie such optimism, and perhaps extend the project in directions
that Warburg may not have anticipated.
If we return to Didi-Huberman’s conception of the atlas as a heuris-
tic of thought, then what are the Atlas panel photographs of, exactly? One
well-remarked aspect of photography is its capacity to arrest time and mo-
tion, and indeed these photographs would seem to capture the middle of a
thought, an unfinished argument held forever suspended. They function as
sketches in an ongoing visual project, or may be likened to screenshots of a
digital workspace. Thus, as Didi-Huberman also suggests, in some ways we
must recognize the unresolved, even futile nature of the project (both War-
burg’s project and our own), an endless effort to explain something that the
author himself never fully grasped or came close to finishing. The fact that
the Mnemosyne Atlas exists in an eternal state of incompletion means that
what Warburg left was indeed a gap, perhaps unbridgeable, between image
and text, between viewer and author. It is no surprise, then, that while many
scholars, including Gombrich, believe the Atlas doomed to failure, it has
also proven to be extraordinarily productive, generating an ever-growing
intellectual and creative afterlife.45 Impossibility, in this case, seems to merge
with Didi-Huberman’s idea of inexhaustibility, the potential for endless
interpretation, recombination, and play. The Mnemosyne Atlas’s existence as
photographs has also allowed for its own migration, its translation into oth-
er spheres, in much the same way that Warburg himself charted the move-
ment of affective gestures. With its panels reduced to the unity and fixity of
photographic reproduction, the Atlas reenters the larger archive of visual
knowledge.

The Digital Image

Having arrived in our own digital age, the Mnemosyne Atlas as Warburg left
it takes on new resonances and suggests new fields of exploration. Keller,
having mapped the rise, fall, and rebirth of the art historical picture atlas,
concludes by suggesting that “our computer screens, at any rate, begin to
look a lot more like Warburg’s panels, and a lot less like the binary slide pro-
jections and double-page halftone pairings which have dominated art histor-
ical books and lectures for a hundred years.”46 One interview with Didi-Hu-
berman begins with the casual observation that “long before computers, Aby
Warburg invented a system with multiple, simultaneously open windows
and hypertexts. Or at least, that is what his fabulous Bilderatlas Mnemosyne
62 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

looks like.”47 This comparison has not been lost on scholars who are directly
involved in the development of digital image databases and digital human-
ities projects. Hans Brandhorst, for one, wonders what Warburg would have
made of a research portal called Arkyves that aggregates a number of dispa-
rate databases using Iconoclass, an iconographically controlled vocabulary.48
Martin Warnke, meanwhile, introduces Hyperimage, a “digital filing box for
image details,” with a discussion of Warburg’s conviction as to the signifi-
cance not only of symbolic images but of the relationships between them.49
Even more recently, Stefka Hristova has used Panel 45 of the Atlas as a case
study in cultural analytics, exploring the idea of color as data in Warburg’s
visual argument.50 In both its conception of images as migratory, contingent,
and changeable, and in its non-linear, open-ended structure, the Atlas has
much in common with what we have come to understand of and expect
from digital images and platforms.
Given the premise of Warburg’s scholarship, it is no great leap to
propose that the thesis of the Atlas, almost by necessity, could or should con-
tinue to apply in our present age. It remains beyond the scope of this paper
to assess Warburg’s theories on an iconological level, but his notions about
the circulation of images appear more relevant in the digital age than ever
before. As artists and scholars Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis point out,
the proliferation and cultural ubiquity of digital technologies and infor-
mation networks mean that we see images of all kinds—art, news, games,
personal snapshots—within the bounds of the same physical/visual space,
usually a computer or smartphone screen.51 This transformation of diverse
objects into a common visual language, collected within a unifying frame-
work, recalls our earlier discussions of atlas tables and the Mnemosyne Atlas’s
use of photography. We can see in this transformation and subsequent mon-
tage of different images and information types a reverberation of Warburg’s
anxiety about technology’s capacity to collapse discursive distances, but also
an extension of his interest in the generative combination of images, in the
ways that they circulate, change, and interact.
A number of recent scholars in the digital humanities also express a
particular interest in the materiality and historical specificity of “the digi-
tal.” Matthew Kirschenbaum, Johanna Drucker, and many others grapple
with these themes on several interlocking registers. For example, there is the
question of digital surrogates, of what happens—what decisions are made,
what is lost and gained—when a digital image is made from a physical ob-
ject, and how the meaning of that object potentially shifts as its digital like-
ness begins to circulate. (This ambivalence also calls to mind a much longer
conversation about the nature of mechanical reproduction, which stretches
at least as far back as Walter Benjamin, and has since been enthusiastical-
ly taken up by several generations of photography historians.52) Further,
Kirschenbaum convincingly asserts that it is impossible to think about digi-
63 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

tal information without paying close attention to the physical platforms that
store and grant access to it. Although we so often consider digital images to
be ephemeral as well as infinitely reproducible, Kirschenbaum insists to the
contrary that, as per the adage of forensic science, “every contact leaves a
trace.” That is, all digital files in fact bear physical evidence of their history
and use, and, thus, no two digital copies are ever exactly alike.53 Drucker,
meanwhile, extends these ideas to introduce the concept of performative
materiality, which proposes that “what something is has to be understood in
terms of what it does, how it works within machinic, systemic, and cultural
domains.”54 Elsewhere, she emphasizes the importance of design and inter-
activity to our understanding of information in both traditional analogue
and digital forms.55
Collectively, these conceptualizations have something important to
offer our consideration of Warburg’s legacy in our contemporary age. Hav-
ing already begun with mechanical (that is, photographic) translations of
key images—or rather, the objects which bear those images—Warburg set
the stage for any number of future transformations. The digitization of the
Atlas’s photographic surrogates means that they have irrevocably entered
the tide of images that circulate online in both scholarly and vernacular
contexts, with or without texts, on different platforms, for different uses and
users. Each digital instance bears the trace of its own journey, and in each in-
stance, as Drucker insists, we must consider anew what these images are do-
ing in order to parse what they might now mean. When perusing the Atlas
online, we are looking at (perhaps even physically holding) a screen bearing
a reversed digital image made from an original glass plate negative taken of
a cloth screen covered in multiple gelatin silver photographs taken of phys-
ical works of art. Or, in some cases, of book pages bearing photomechanical
reproductions, or of newspaper pages, in which case the trail goes on even
further. The digital image itself may have also been copied, uploaded, and
downloaded any number of times. These permutations each represent a
series of choices, an ongoing and by no means linear material and cultural
history, and, I would argue, a critical extension of Warburg’s project.
Indeed, one effect of the perpetual circulation and reproduction of
digital images is their eventual degradation. Daniel Palmer likens the inter-
net to “a giant copying machine,” noting that “when an image is viewed, it
is copied from one database to the user’s local hard drive,” with the inevita-
ble result that the files lose information and become, in Hito Steyerl’s termi-
nology, “poor images.”56 For Steyerl, the poor image is “a copy in motion”
and is characteristic of information that has circulated outside of officially
sanctioned channels.57 Although Warburg seems to have accepted, even wel-
comed, the visual disparity between his source material and its photograph-
ic surrogates, it is difficult to ignore the reality that after years of circulation,
having been copied and recopied, the resulting images are not as legible as
64 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

they once were. Websites

such as Engramma’s Mne-
mosyne Atlas resource or
Cornell University’s Mne-
mosyne: Meanderings through
Aby Warburg’s Atlas attempt
to remedy this reduced
legibility by allowing users
to zoom in on image details
and including higher-qual-
ity reproductions from
other sources, with varying
degrees of success (Figs. 4
and 5).58 But we might see
the gradual degradation of
Warburg’s original sources
as precisely a visible man-
ifestation of his project’s
materiality: its trajectory not
only across time and space,
Fig. 4. Screen capture taken October 3, 2018, La Rivista but also across media. As
di Engramma website, Mnemosyne Atlas webpage,
“From the Cosmos to Man and Back,” image open
these images break down—
access, courtesy of Engramma, https://tinyurl.com/ at least for those of us
y29bwdqk. Includes high-quality image details taken without access to the gela-
from diverse external sources and provided to sup- tin silver “originals” in the
plement the panel photograph. This feature has not Warburg archive—they may
yet been implemented for every Atlas panel or detail. function less effectively as
a means to study the indi-
vidual details of classical
friezes and Renaissance paintings, but they remain compelling as surrogates
for Warburg’s project more broadly.59 This transformation is not necessarily
what Warburg intended, and it elides much of the original depth and erudi-
tion of his project, but it is part of the reality of the Mnemosyne Atlas’s digital
afterlife. Museum exhibitions offer another way for people to engage with
the Atlas today. Some take Warburg’s project as their conceptual starting
point, while others seek to reconstruct his panels as physical objects. Such
exhibitions are more limited in their capacity to travel, but translate the Atlas
into a more immediate and legible—albeit highly mediated—form. Further,
these exhibitions, along with the Atlas’s various digital manifestations, have
the advantage of making Warburg’s project more accessible and appealing
to a broader, less academic audience.60 Such an audience would likely be far
less receptive to Warburg’s art historical arguments in all their labyrinthine
complexity.
65 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

Fig. 5. Screen capture taken October 3, 2018, Mnemosyne: Meanderings

through Aby Warburg’s Atlas, Panel B webpage, image used with permission
of Cornell University Library, https://tinyurl.com/y32otuaf. Includes
zoom function in the “guided pathway” feature, available for ten of the
Atlas panels.

The Digital Archive

Finally, I would like to return to Didi-Huberman’s conception of the atlas as

a productive, indeterminate form, and to emphasize his distinction between
the atlas—a “synoptic presentation” whose function is to visually represent
the “secret link” between disparate objects—and the archive, which he sees
as fundamentally non-visual and temporally protracted.61 I do not intend to
argue that we should conflate atlases and archives. Nonetheless, it would
seem that Didi-Huberman’s interpretation, discussed earlier, of the atlas as
existing in a perpetual state of flux glosses over the differences between the
atlas as a published book (therefore finalized, albeit open to interpretation)
and an unfinished and thus inherently unstable project like the Mnemosyne
Atlas. The Atlas was intrinsically bound up with the content and structure
of Warburg’s library, from which he drew his images. In light of this de-
pendence, we might qualify Didi-Huberman’s argument by proposing that
the Mnemosyne Atlas, at the stage in which Warburg left it, rests (or perhaps
vibrates) somewhere between the atlas and the archive. From the former, it
derives its insistence on visual argument and its engagement with an ad-
mittedly circumscribed, if still unsettled, pool of records.62 From the latter, it
acquires its contingency, its fragmentation, and its perpetual state of expec-
66 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

tancy and motion.

These last qualities may be ascribed to archives in general, but they
also suggest more recent conceptions of the archive and archival possibility
in the digital age. Mitchell Whitelaw, for example, argues for what he calls
generous interfaces for digital collections; that is, infrastructure for online
databases that goes beyond the traditional and highly restrictive keyword
search and static results pages, and instead encourages multiple, flexible
ways of accessing records.63 Recalling Warburg, he proposes that “in re-
vealing the complexity of digital collections, a generous interface would
also enrich interpretation by revealing relationships and structures within a
collection.”64 Not simply a question of convenience or aesthetics, Whitelaw
further contends that as cultural heritage increasingly exists and circulates
across digital networks, “the life and use of that heritage will increasingly be
conditioned by the forms in which it reaches us, how it is made concrete and
available both for scholars and the wider public.”65
Indeed, scholars are also recognizing the critical re-evaluation of the
structure, content, and accessibility of public, and especially digital, archives
as a social and political imperative. They consider this reexamination a mat-
ter of responsibility toward populations that have traditionally been denied
access to such collections in one way or another. In these conversations,
what (and who) has been excluded from the archive is just as important as
what has been saved. Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell write about what
they call “impossible archival imaginaries,” for example. They argue that
“the roles of individual and collective imaginings about the absent or unat-
tainable archive and its contents should be explicitly acknowledged, in both
archival theory and practice,” as a counterweight to hegemonic conceptions
of evidence that “so often fall short in explaining the capacity of records and
archives to motivate, inspire, anger and traumatize.”66 Warburg, we will re-
member, spent the years of the First World War documenting the chaos and
trauma that he and those around him were experiencing. In Gilliland and
Caswell’s speculation, the very absence of evidence constitutes its own kind
of record, and has the potential to exert a powerful shaping force against or
within the archive. Here again, we might identify Warburg’s sense of pro-
ductive distance, the space for interpretation not between image and text,
but between archive and (missing) evidence, between archive and (missing)
subject. Blurring the line between the visual argument of the atlas and the
invisibility of the archive, we find in the latter the capacity to tell necessary
stories, even in the absence of concrete images.
The Mnemosyne Atlas has proven to be immensely provocative and
seductive over many decades, not only due to the complexity of its art his-
torical thesis and the originality of its method, but also because of the tan-
talizingly incomplete state in which it was so abruptly left. Early attempts
by Warburg’s disciples, who were in many ways the best equipped to un-
67 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

derstand and give a satisfactory shape to the fragments of Warburg’s Atlas,

seem—admittedly, from the distant and biased vantage point of the present
day—to have been incapable of appreciating its particular idiosyncrasies.
Clearly, to fix Warburg’s great project within the confines of a printed book
is to stifle its most compelling aspects. Warburg himself may have recog-
nized this potential shortcoming. With the extension of his project to include
images from the mass media, the advertisements and news items of his own
era, Warburg effectively precluded the possibility of settling the Atlas into
a final state of rest. And while he may not have anticipated that his project
would enact its own thesis, having left the Atlas in contradictory iterations
and fragments, having turned it into a set of images of itself, Warburg left
open this possibility. Thus the Atlas, while still studied by many scholars for
the nuances of its art historical argument, has taken on entirely new valenc-
es and anticipated technological developments and cultural discourses at
which Warburg could only have guessed. As a series of photographs, it has
circulated and been reimagined and reinvented in ways that suggest both its
inability to ever function as a finalized argument, and its inexhaustibility as
a symbol, as images of and in motion.
68 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

Notes

1. Christopher D. Johnson, “About the Mnemosyne Atlas,” Mnemosyne:

Meanderings through Aby Warburg’s Atlas, Cornell University, 2013-2016,
https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/about.

2. Warburg, qtd. in E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography,

2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 270-71. The transla-
tion is Gombrich’s. This quote comes from Warburg’s lecture on Medicean
Festivals.

3. Katia Mazzucco, “(Photographic) Subject-Matter: Fritz Saxl Indexing Mne-

mosyne – A Stratigraphy of the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection’s
System,” Visual Resources 30, no. 3 (July 3, 2014): 201-02, https://doi.org/10.1
080/01973762.2014.936100.

4. Warburg, qtd. in Gombrich, Intellectual Biography, 301. The translation is

Gombrich’s.

5. Christopher S. Wood, “Aby Warburg, Homo victor,” Journal of Art Historiog-

raphy, no. 11 (December 2014): 1-24.

6. Aby Warburg and Matthew Rampley, “The Absorption of the Expressive

Values of the Past,” Art in Translation 1, no. 2 (2009): 273-83, https://doi.
org/10.2752/175613109X462708.

7. Emily Verla Bovino, “The Nachleben of Mnemosyne: The Afterlife of the

Bilderatlas,” La Rivista di Engramma 119 (September 2014): section A, http://
www.engramma.it/eOS2/atlante/index.php?id_articolo=1618.

8. Ibid.

9. It is important to acknowledge here that I have looked only at English-lan-

guage (and translated) scholarship for the present essay, out of practical
necessity. Certainly there is copious additional literature on Warburg in
German, as well as in other languages.

10. Gombrich arrived in London in 1936 on a two-year fellowship explicitly

aimed at organizing and revising Warburg’s notes.

11. For a complete overview of the contents of the Birthday Atlas, see Katia
Mazzucco, “The Work of Ernst H. Gombrich on the Aby M. Warburg Frag-
69 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

ments,” Journal of Historiography 5 (December, 2011): 8n21, https://arthisto-

riography.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/mazzucco-gombrich.pdf.

12. Interestingly, although Mazzucco seems confident in her understanding

of the spatial orientation in which Warburg’s original plates were arranged
and meant to be read, other scholars appear less certain. Lyndell Brown and
Charles Green, for example, insist on the significance of a horizontal read-
ing of the panels, noting that their “lateral trajectory is crucial.” See Lyndell
Brown and Charles Green, “Robert Smithson’s Ghost in 1920s Hamburg:
Reading Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas as a Non-Site,” Visual Resources 18,
no. 2 (January 1, 2002): 171, https://doi.org/10.1080/01973760290011824.
Charlotte Schoell-Glass, meanwhile, in her reading of plate 79, points out
that “it is not made clear by numbers or other indications in which sequence
we are to ‘read’ the images.” She proposes that one “read the plate like a
page of a medieval glossed text,” in other words, “look at this plate as a
composite that does not necessarily have to be read from top left to bottom
right.” See Charlotte Schoell-Glass, “Warburg’s Late Comments on Sym-
bol and Ritual,” Science in Context 12 (1999): 631, https://doi.org/10.1017/
S026988970000363X.

13. Mazzucco, “The Work of Ernst H. Gombrich,” 16.

14. Ibid.

15. Schoell-Glass, “Warburg’s Late Comments,” 626.

16. Gombrich, Intellectual Biography, 292.

17. Ibid.

18. Gombrich, Intellectual Biography, 3.

19. Included in Mazzucco, “The Work of Ernst H. Gombrich,” 20. The Gom-
brich text quoted here comes from an unpublished typescript in the Warburg
archive, dated 1939. See footnote 35 in Mazzucco for its location within the
archive.

20. Mazzucco, “The Work of Ernst H. Gombrich,” 6.

21. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’: The Anomic Ar-

chive,” October 88 (1999): 118, https://doi.org/10.2307/779227. Emphasis in
original.
70 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

22. Buchloh, “Anomic Archive,” 129.

23. Schoell-Glass, “Warburg’s Late Comments,” 624.

24. Ibid. This is Warburg’s term. Emphasis in original.

25. It is worth underscoring that Bilderatlas, which was the term Warburg
used for his project, means “picture atlas.”

26. Both Keller and Kurt W. Forster note the particular significance of the
paired photograph to the highly influential art historical scholarship of
Heinrich Wölfflin. As Forster puts it, “the binary order [at the basis of Wölf-
flin’s method] leads to ideas that seem to issue from the images rather than
from the historian’s interpretative intent. Or, put another way, the historian
is merely the arrangeur creating a disposition that helps instantiate the latent
power of images.” Kurt W. Forster, “Images as Memory Banks: Warburg,
Wölfflin, Schwitters, and Sebald,” La Rivista de Engramma, no. 100 (Septem-
ber-October 2012), http://www.engramma.it/eOS2/index.php?id_artico-
lo=924. Interestingly, Johanna Drucker makes a similar point about graphical
representations of knowledge as a whole. “Most information visualizations,”
she writes, “are acts of interpretation masquerading as presentation.” Jo-
hanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2014), 8.

27. Ulrich Keller, “Visual Difference: Picture Atlases from Winckelmann to

Warburg and the Rise of Art History,” Visual Resources 17, no. 2 (2001): 194,
https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2001.9658588.

28. Ibid., 186.

29. Ibid., 195.

30. See, for example, Georges Didi-Huberman, “Warburg’s Haunted

House,” Common Knowledge 18, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 50-78, https://doi.
org/10.1215/0961754X-1456881. Warburg’s response to the chaos of the
First World War, during which he feverishly attempted to collect any and all
documentation of the conflict as it unfolded, is well documented. Warburg’s
institutionalization followed the end of the war.

31. Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back?
(Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010), 18. Emphasis in
the original. Catherine Millet, “Atlas: comment remonter le monde,” Art-
press, no. 373 (2010): 55.
71 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

32. Didi-Huberman, Atlas, 20.

33. Keller, “Visual Difference,” 195.

34. Ibid., 192.

35. Kurt W. Forster, “Aby Warburg’s History of Art: Collective Memory and
the Social Mediation of Images,” Daedalus 105 (1976): 171.

36. Ibid. Indeed, Warburg famously traded his birthright at age thirteen for
the promise that his brother would buy him all of the books he wanted—a
rather expensive commitment, as it turned out.

37. Gombrich, Intellectual Biography, 224.

38. Matthew Rampley, “Archives of Memory: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades

Project and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas,” in The Optic of Walter Benjamin,
ed. Alex Coles (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1999), 96.

39. Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New York:
Zone Books, 2004), 278.

40. Ibid., 281.

41. Ibid., 283.

42. Buchloh, “Anomic Archive,” 118.

43. Per Rumberg, “Aby Warburg and the Anatomy of Art History,” in Photo
Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, ed. Constanza Caraffa
(Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011), 249.

44. Gombrich, Intellectual Biography, 287.

45. Lyndell Brown and Charles Green in particular highlight the Atlas’s sta-
tus as a “failed art historical curiosity,” on the basis of which their aim is “to
remove Warburg’s last project…from the domain of his iconologist guard-
ians, in order to place it in the context of contemporary art practice, propos-
ing a new reading of a proto-conceptual work.” Brown and Green, “Robert
Smithson’s Ghost,” 168.

46. Keller, “Visual Difference,” 196-97.

72 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

47. Millet, “Georges Didi-Huberman,” 49.

48. Hans Brandhorst, “Aby Warburg’s Wildest Dreams Come True?,” Visual
Resources 29, nos. 1-2 (2013): 74, https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2013.7611
29. The Arkyves platform can be accessed at http://dev.arkyves.org/.

49. Martin Warnke, “‘God Is in the Details,’ or The Filing Box Answers,” in
Imagery in the 21st Century, ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011),
324. Hyperimage can be accessed at http://hyperimage.ws/en/.

50. Stefka Hristova, “Images as Data: Cultural Analytics and Aby Warburg’s
Mnemosyne,” International Journal for Digital Art History, no. 2 (2016): 117-32,
https://doi.org/10.11588/dah.2016.2.23489. Given my earlier point about
the significance of black and white photography for Warburg’s project, I
wonder whether this colorization is productive.

51. Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis, “A Life More Photographic,” Pho-
tographies 1, no. 1 (2008): 14, https://doi.org/10.1080/17540760701785842.

52. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 1969).

53. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imag-
ination (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008). This phrase, which titles Kirschen-
baum’s first chapter, was adapted from the forensic pioneer Edmond Locard.

54. Johanna Drucker, “Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches

to Interface,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013): 4, http://www.
digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000143/000143.html.

55. See Drucker, Graphesis; Joanna Drucker and Bethany Nowviskie, “Specu-
lative Computing: Aesthetic Provocations in Humanities Computing,” in
Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman et al. (Oxford: Black-
well Publishing Professional, 2004), n. p.

56. Daniel Palmer, “The Rhetoric of the JPEG,” The Photographic Image in Dig-
ital Culture, ed. Martin Lister (New York: Routledge, 2013), 162; Hito Steyerl,
“In Defense of the Poor Image,” E-flux 10 (2009): 1, http://www.e-flux.com/
journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.

57. Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” 1.

73 ABY WARBURG'S MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

58. See https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/ and https://tinyurl.com/y29b-

wdqk.

59. Steyerl argues that the insistence on “rich” (that is: pristine, authen-
tic) images can lead to their invisibility, as original prints are “preserved,”
unseen, in archives or fade into material obsolescence. It is sometimes only
as degraded, compromised copies that images are able to circulate and be
viewed. Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” 3-4.

60. See for example the exhibition New Ghost Stories (Nouvelles Histoires de
Fantômes), organized by Didi-Huberman with photographer Arno Gisinger
at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2014. Mostafa Heddaya, “Lamenting Images:
‘New Ghost Stories’ at Palais de Tokyo,” Hyperallergic, September 5, 2014,
https://hyperallergic.com/146426/lamenting-images-new-ghost-stories-at-
palais-de-tokyo/.

61. “Atlas. Entrevista a Georges Didi-Huberman,” Museo Nacional Centro

de Arte Reina Sofía, December 21, 2010, 3:44, https://vimeo.com/18063038.

62. Didi-Huberman points out that the thousand or so images comprising

the Atlas at any given time is relatively small “in relation to the life of an art
historian.” Didi-Huberman, Atlas, 20.

63. Mitchell Whitelaw, “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collec-

tions,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9, no. 1 (2015): 1-16, http://www.digi-
talhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/1/000205/000205.html. Whitelaw examines a
number of promising examples of such interfaces, such as the website for the
Prints and Printmaking Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, but
suggests that they are exceptions to the rule.

64. Whitelaw, “Generous Interfaces,” 1.

65. Ibid., 2.

66. Anne J. Gilliand and Michelle Caswell, “Records and Their Imaginaries:
Imagining the Impossible, Making Possible the Imagined,” Archival Science
16, no. 1 (March 2016): 55, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-015-9259-z.