“An important archive for fashion world”
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Angelica Blechschmidt, the long-time editor-in-chief of VOGUE Germany, used her camera to capture – almost nonstop – the happenings at fashion shows and industry events and usually had the films developed overnight. “Angelica Blechschmidt’s photographic legacy is an important archive for fashion,” says Dr. Jan C. Watzlawik, a cultural anthropologist specializing in material culture, museums and fashion. “Her collection shows not only how trends develop but also documents in detail the socio-cultural conditions in the industry from the 1980s to the 2000s. This makes it an invaluable reservoir for research projects related to art, cultural studies or the social sciences.” In addition to her photographs, Angelica Blechschmidt also collected countless documents, such as invitations, correspondence, travel itineraries and show schedules, magazines and draft articles – right up until her retirement in 2003.
Scientific approach
Angelica Blechschmidt, who died in 2018, left her extensive collection in its original state to her friend, the gallerist Kirsten Landwehr, who is supporting the researchers at TU Dortmund University by loaning material for the project. To make the unsorted pictures and documents accessible for research, the team has examined some of them in a preliminary study and experimented with work processes potentially suitable for cataloging the collection. To this end, the researchers have first of all analyzed all the available contextual materials and digitized over 580 documents. Alicia Jablonski, research assistant at the Center for Cultural Anthropology of Textiles, explains: “The documents, such as show schedules and invitations, enable us to attribute the individual photos to when, where and on what occasion were they taken. In combination with Angelica Blechschmidt’s notes handwritten on some of them, we can systematically index the collection as a scientific source.”
Based on the classification structure they have developed, the research team scanned and categorized over 530 photos in the preliminary study. “Angelica Blechschmidt staked less of an artistic claim to the pictures she took with her camera and did not have them developed on special paper either. And yet it becomes clear from the collection that for her it was more than just a kind of memory box or a hobby,” says Dr. Watzlawik. “She also had a journalistic interest in her snaps and published them, for example, in her own VOGUE column – ‘Flash!’”
Documentation of exclusivity and triviality
In its analysis of the collection’s scientific yield, the team is also appraising which photographs and documents belong to the research subject and which ones are excluded because they are private – a boundary that is fluid and sometimes difficult to define. Jan C. Watzlawik says: “On the one hand, the collection shows the rituals of exclusivity, such as the gift bags for Paris fashion shows sent to her room at Hôtel Ritz. On the other hand, her photographs also document the everyday life of this exclusive circle, to which the media only had very controlled access at the time.”
The researchers face the challenge of identifying everyone shown in the photographs, both for the cataloging as well as for the legal clarification of the usage rights necessary for a potential research and teaching database. “That’s why we would like to use AI in our future work to help us automatically recognize faces, especially in group pictures,” says Alicia Jablonski.
Further research
The researchers are currently working on a renewal proposal that would allow a scientific analysis of the whole inventory within a follow-on project. For the digitization and archiving of the entire collection, the team would like to work with external partners in the future so that the large number of sensitive negatives and documents can be cataloged and preserved professionally as quickly as possible.
Dr. Jan C. Watzlawik is receiving project funding from the TU Dortmund Young Academy for the preliminary study of the photographs. With this program, the Graduate Center TU Dortmund University helps postdoctoral researchers in the qualification phase to establish a research profile with strong external funding.
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