Shadow Archives

As part of the dissemination programme of the IartNET project, Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera announces the participation of Nicoletta Leonardi, Full Professor of Photographic History and History of Printing and Print Culture, in the Folkwang Photo Talks lecture series at Erasmus partner institution Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen.

In her lecture, Shadow Archives: Artistic Pedagogies and the Politics of the Copy in the Nineteenth Century, Nicoletta Leonardi explores how photographic teaching collections—once central to artistic training but later marginalized as obsolete—constitute a “shadow archive” of modern visual culture. Drawing on case studies from Italian art academies, she examines collections of photographs, casts, drawings, and prints as active mediators of knowledge, gender, and power. These materials shape the ways students learn 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 lecture situates the copy at the intersection of pedagogy, media, and ideology.

Within this framework, the copy emerges not as a mere imitation but as a productive instrument that sustains the transmission of style, technique, and visual authority across generations. These intermedial pedagogies reveal a complex ecology of images in which photography functions both as a new technology and as an heir to older traditions of replication and display.

Nicoletta Leonardi is Full Professor of Photographic History and History of Printing and Print Culture at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where she also curates the Historical Photographic Collection. Her research focuses on overcoming medium-specific approaches to the history of photography in favour of systemic analyses of intermedial relations among technologies, artefacts, and visual cultures. She is the author of two monographs and numerous essays and edited volumes, including 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. She currently serves as 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 the NextGenerationEU-funded project Fotografiste: Women in Photography from Italian Archives, 1839–1939.

Established in 2022, the Folkwang Photo Talks provide an international platform for interdisciplinary research in photography and visual studies, bringing together leading scholars to present and discuss new research projects.