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Institute of Fine Arts Conference Proceedings >
Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, part III >
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29910
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| Title: | The Richard Offner Photo Archives at the Institute of Fine Arts: Seeing
Paintings in Black-and-White, or Methodologies of Connoisseurship |
| Authors: | Kanter, Laurence |
| Keywords: | Offner, Richard
photo archives
connoisseurship
photography |
| Issue Date: | 24-Feb-2011 |
| Abstract: | 'We need not even speak of the absence of color. Photography has not
yet learnt to reproduce that with any accuracy or reliability.' Richard
Offner, 'An Outline of a Theory of Method,' 'Studies in Florentine
Painting,' 1927 Among the least well-known and most under-utilized
resources at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York is the photograph
collection amassed by Richard Offner during his four decades as
Professor there. Offner's photo archive differs materially from
comparable collections assembled by his predecessor, Bernard Berenson,
or such collections as those formed by his contemporary, Gertrude Coor,
or pupil, James Stubblebine (the latter two also preserved at the
Institute of Fine Arts), in that it was not principally meant as a tool
for sorting large categories within the history of art but rather as an
aid to making fine distinctions within categories, congruent with
Offner's aims as a connoisseur. Also unlike the compiler of any other
art history photo archive, Offner was acutely sensitive to the
limitations of photography as much as he was to its benefits. 'If
photography were an entirely mechanical process it would render the
pictorial object with a calculable difference from it. Unhappily,
photography is largely an interpretative affair. It has this in common
with general artistic practice, that the result is determined by the
whim and genius of the operator, and the camera is only one of the
determinants of the result.' (Offner, Ibid., 1927) Thus, Offner's
objection to color was only in part due to the lag in photographic
technology. It was more fundamentally an objection to introducing one
more subjective, uncontrollable variable to his research material. |
| Description: | Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29910 |
| Appears in Collections: | Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, part III
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