Shadow Archives: Artistic Pedagogies and the Politics of the Copy in the Nineteenth Century

A Folkwang Photo Talk by Nicoletta Leonardi, Brera Academy of Fine Arts MilanThe Folkwang Photo Talks are a lecture series featuring international scholars and researchers who present and discuss emerging research projects in the field of photography.Drawing on case studies from Italian art academies, this talk examines how photographic teaching collections—once central to artistic training but later marginalized as obsolete—formed a shadow archive of modern visual culture. These collections, comprising photographs, casts, drawings, and prints, were not passive tools but active mediators of knowledge, gender, and power. They shaped how students learned to see, reproduce, and classify images, while also reflecting the gendered divisions of artistic labour and the colonial imaginaries underpinning European aesthetics. By tracing the circulation of photographs between classrooms, museums, and industries, the talk situates the »copy« at the intersection of pedagogy, media, and ideology. The copy emerges here not as a mere imitation but as a productive instrument—one that sustained the transmission of style, technique, and visual authority across generations. These intermedial pedagogies reveal a complex ecology of images where photography functioned both as a new technology and as an heir to older traditions of replication and display.