Collecting Faces

Abstract

The notion of the archive has attracted attention in the aftermath of what is sometimes called “an archival turn” within the humanities – it has been discussed both as a metaphor for power and in terms of its materiality and dependency on media practices.[1] The archives structure our knowledge and determine what can be said at a certain time, as Michel Foucault famously pointed out in the late 1960s. But are there differences in kind between the use of archives by the various disciplines within the humanities, for example art historians and historians?