Sunday, October 7, 2012

Aby Warburg: Mnemosyne-Atlas

Mnemosyne-Atlas


A major debate we face questions photography as fine art or as documentation. Can it serve both purposes? Is anything staged honestly "truth"? I think this is a strong example of photography as a documentation rather than fine art, though it is interesting much of the context is on the subject of fine art.

It is said that Warburg traded his substantial inheritance for something of more endurance. By the time of his death in 1929, Aby Warburg had collected over 60,000 books in his personal library which has since been contributed to  London University's Warburg Institute,  according to Frieze Magazine. This article describes the Mnemosyne Atlas as such:
It is the strangest of art-historical artifacts: the kaleidoscopic image of the scholar’s enigmatic reordering of a lifetime’s meditation on the image.
In a sense, the Mnemosyne Atlas has never really existed, at least not in the form Warburg envisaged. At the time of his death it comprised 79 wooden panels, covered with black fabric, on which were pinned some 2,000 photographs from Warburg’s collection. 

Check out this link to see more images!


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