Folkwang Photo Talk with Nicoletta Leonardi

6.11.2025

We are looking forward to welcoming professor Nicoletta Leonardi from our partner university, Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, for our next Folkwang Photo Talk:

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

The talk will take place on November 6, 2025, at 6 pm at Folkwang University’s Quartier Nord, room 2.13. Everybody inside and outside the university is welcome!

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.

Nicoletta Leonardi is a Full Professor of Photographic History and History of Printing and Print Culture at Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan, where she also curates the Historical Photographic Collection. Her work is based on the overcoming of the history of photography as a medium-specific discipline in favour of a systemic approach to the study of different media as integrated networks of technologies, artifacts, materialities, and imaginings.  She has authored two monographs and several essays and edited volumes, among which, most recently, »Le raccolte fotografiche storiche nelle Accademie di belle arti e nelle Scuole di arti applicate« (Forum, 2024, with Monica Maffioli).  She has been a Wallace Fellow at Villa I Tatti/Harvard University, a Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University, and a Researcher in Residence at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. Currently, she is Principal Investigator of the Horizon Europe funded project »IartNET: A Digital Platform for Cultural Heritage and Artistic Research at Italian Higher Arts Education Institutions,« and Associate Principal Investigator of NextGenerationEU funded project »Fotografiste: Women in Photography from Italian Archives, 1839–1939.«