OPENING SPEECH BY COSTANZA CARAFFA 14 Ottobre 2021 h. 15 Increasing Value. Photographs and the Art Market

 

Costanza Caraffa, Head of the Phototek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz

Opening speech:  Increasing Value. Photographs and the Art Market

Costanza Caraffa (MA in architecture, Milan 1992; PhD in art history, Berlin 2003) has been Head of the Photothek at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max Planck Institute (KHI) since 2006. In 2009 she initiated the Photo Archives open conference series with meetings in London (2009), Florence (2009, 2011, 2019), New York (2011), Los Angeles (2016), and Oxford (2017) (next planned meetings: Basel 2021, Chicago 2022). She edited or co-edited among others Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History (2011), Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation (2015), Photo-Objects. On the Materiality of Photographs and Photo Archives in the Humanities and Sciences (2019), Foto-Objekte. Forschen in archäologischen, ethnologischen und kunsthistorischen Archiven (2020), as well as the journal issues Photography and Art Market around 1900 and Encounters: Handling, Placing and Looking at Photographs in Relation to Migration (both 2020). In 2009 she authored the Florence Declaration – Recommendations for the preservation of analogue photo archives. Between 2015 and 2018 she was coordinator of the collaborative project Photo-Objects – Photographs as (Research) Objects in Archaeology, Ethnology and Art History and co-curated the exhibition “Unboxing Photographs” (Berlin 2018). In recent years she intensified collaboration projects with artists such as Antonio Di Cecco, Armin Linke, Massimo Ricciardo and Akram Zaatari. The Photothek at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz is a founding member of PHAROS, The International Consortium of Photo Archives.