Crisis and collection

This study traces how the art historian Aby Warburg, the writer W.G. Sebald, and the artist Gerhard Richter explore collective cultural memory embedded in contemporary visual symbols. The work establishes previously unnoted intellectual connections between their respective visual memory archives and the intellectual traditions that inform them. Diagnosing and describing how the reinvention of the album and the atlas as organizational models of narrative and pictorial presentation coincide with the contemporary fascination with social networks supplied by platforms such as Facebook, this study argues that the hybridity of the models allows the association of disparate fields of knowledge and memory that speaks to contemporary audiences and explains the persistent fascination with the memory archives at hand.