Photographs at the frontier

"Aby Warburg (1866-1929) belongs to the elite group of scholars and thinkers maturing at the turn of the nineteenth century who shaped the directions to be taken in the following hundred years. He is known not simply for his pioneering scholarship of Italian Renaissance art and culture, but for the totality of his approach, the interest he took in the whole process of what anthropologists now call symbolization, the creation of symbols by societies to represent their world. This book studies a crucial moment in his development, when, in 1895, diverted from his projected studies in Italy, he crossed to New York to attend his brother's wedding, then, encouraged by the contacts he had made with scholars of the Smithsonian Institution, made a trip deep into the Arizona desert to study Hopi culture at first hand.^ There is no doubt that this anthropological venture, though he did not formulate his thoughts about it on paper until much later, in a lecture of 1923, both reflected and helped to form an approach to the Italian Renaissance that was to revolutionize twentieth-century attitudes to culture. Warburg took photographs documenting the significant stages along his journey, which tod