Managing Image Collections

Introduction

The soul never thinks without an image.

(Aristotle)

Everything transitory is but an image.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling.

(Franz Kafka, 1921)

Since the first drawings in the caves at Lascaux, France were executed almost twenty-two thousand years ago, information has been shared via evolving systems of pictures and symbols. Cave paintings and online image collections are both ‘digital’, the former created by drawing the fingers across clay, the latter created by computer ...