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Rundbrief Fotografie
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The Collection Poche (Aleppo, Syria): Conservation
The private photograph collection Poche (in Aleppo, Syria) was
conserved during a five week project by two students of the course
of studies "Restoration and Conservation of Archive and Library
Records and Works of Art on Paper" at the Staatliche Akademie der
Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, supervised by Regina Schneller
(conservation), Rüdiger Klein (Orientalisches Seminar der
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen), and the owner of
the collection, Jenny Poche, in the spring of 2003. The collection
contains approximately 4,000 objects dating 1860-1945, among them
glass plate negatives, sheet films, prints, photograph albums, and
photo-technical equipment. The project was a follow-up to the
conservation of the private Poche/Marcopoli archives of written
records.
CEBHEM, Forschungsstelle für Wirtschafts- und
Unternehmensgeschichte des östlichen Mittelmeerraumes und
Nahen Ostens, Haußerstr. 43, 72076 Tübingen, Germany,
http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/CEBHEM
Media-theoretical considerations on photographing and
collecting photographs and digital pictures
There are no established methods that retain the privilege to
truth any longer. The localization of knowledge has been
surrendered, as has the transcending bond to truths beyond one's
own, individual, physical existence. Several times now, a parallel
to history has been ascertained for changes in the transition of
the physio-chemical in photography, often established as the
progress from so-called "analogue" image generation to the
electronic, "digital" record. In the age of 'post-medial
constructions of art', some may be contributing to a new
contextualization of the visual inventory of culture in our
society through multi-faceted assessments of the altered
foundations of collecting and preserving photographs. The
following remarks are arranged in four parts and result in a
rather complex conclusion. These four parts are written as
"activa" and should be understood as such: to photograph, to
collect, to archive, and to transform.
On the History of Stereoscopy: The Bavarian Stereobildwerke
The introduction of the Stereo-Indupor system in 1920,
developed by Professor Alfred Krauth and Carl Neithold, and in
particular of the pocket stereoscopes, led to the adoption of the
9x12 cm stereo format by numerous photographers and stereo image
publishing houses in the 1920's. The Bavarian Stereobildwerke in
Munich also used this stereo format. Contrary to their
competitors, however, they did not make use of the Indupor pocket
stereoscopes or their imitations. Instead, they introduced their
own viewing devices to the market.
Virtual Photograph Museums (Part II and end)
Photographic prints that have been made from one negative are
all material traces that are distinct, even though they are
derived from the same source. In some cases the original negative
was lost and new negatives are made by negative duplication or by
the photographic reproduction of other positives. Often a
photographic image exists as a print and as an illustration in
books and magazines. In each genre thousands of copies can be
made, each one of them being more or less identical. Therefore the
line of reasoning that photography has no original is
understandable. What happens, though, if a certain photographic
image is downloaded from a website, perhaps from a virtual museum?
When a user enters the website and looks at the photograph, does
he or she see the same picture as everyone else or perhaps another
version that is transported by bits to the computer desktop? How
does the situation change if one decides to copy the file to one's
own hard disk? Is this picture identical (normally the identical
bit configuration) to the one on the website, or has it become a
different picture? The presence of photographic pictures in the
internet generates complex questions that concern the ontological
nature of photography. This subject matter is naturally connected
with the extensive debate on the consequences of digitization of
photographic images.
American Museum of Photography: http://www.photographymuseum.com
| „museum of museums": http://www.museumlink.com/virtual.htm
| Archives & Museum Informatics: http://www.archimuse.com
Photographers' Estates in the State Archive Freiburg:
Considerations Regarding Use, Inventory, and Marketing
Photographs in archives may still be counted among the more
neglected elements of our heritage. Even though preservation
measures have increasingly been the subject of professional debate
and projects in recent years, the areas of inventory and timely
marketing and usage are still in the fledgling stages. This
despite the fact that photographs in particular are in the
position to refer to the existence of archives and their treasures
in our increasingly visualized world, thus opening them to new
groups of users. 'Single-handed efforts' of archives within this
area are rarely successful or even lasting. More reasonable would
rather be a co-operation with partners who have positioned
themselves in specific segments of the image market and thus
already possess skills that the archives would have to tediously
acquire with the use of otherwise urgently needed resources:
market experience and customer loyalty. Using the examples of two
photographers' estates, the picture archives of Willy Pragher and
Sepp Allgeier, the State Archive Freiburg's experience of
co-operation with different partners is described.
Bestand Willy Pragher im Staatsarchiv Freiburg ("W 134"):
http://www.landesarchiv-bw.de/ofs/olf/start.php?archiv=staf&id=21
| Historicum.Net (Netzwerk für Geschichts- und
Kunstwissenschaften): http://www.
photographie.historicum.net | SEPIA-Projekt „Changing
Images. The role of photographic collections in a digital age":
http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/sepia/conference.html
| Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz: http://www.bildarchiv-bpk.de
Long-Term Preservation of Digital Resources in German Museums:
The Nestor Project
ICOM Germany calls on museums to preserve objects and their
documentation for future generations and to make them accessible
for scientific research. There are, however, to date no standards
for the long-term preservation of digital resources. "Nestor" is
an expert network for the long-term archiving and availability of
digital resources that has been brought into being and is now
being promoted by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research.
The Nestor study "Digitization and Acquisition of Digitized
Information in German Museums" examined, for the first time, how
museums produce data and preserve it for future use. It was found
that the majority of museums work with a modest technical
equipment setup and little personnel. Only a fraction of the
collections has been digitized. Technical and semantic standards
are not present. Serious deficits in the long-term safeguarding of
data were noted. Hardly any museums possess written guidelines for
digitization workflows or long-term preservation concerns. The
majority of the museums were also not aware of the significance of
platform-independent data formats.
Nestor &endash; Kompetenznetzwerk Langzeitarchivierung und
Langzeitverfügbarkeit digitaler Ressourcen für
Deutschland: http://www.langzeitarchivierung.de
Do photographs show history?
"All texts, objects, and facts from which knowledge of the past
may be gained, we call sources", writes Paul Kirn: a definition
that is largely accepted among most historians. What position does
a photograph occupy in this context? Neither text nor fact, is it
nevertheless at least an object (although actually more than that)
which shows traces of human action. Is it thus logically a
historical source? This is not necessarily apparent, since (not
only) this imaging medium rarely holds the interest of the history
sciences as a historical source. A reason for this may be found in
the medium-specific problems of interpretation which arise for a
scientific discipline focused on texts: photographs connote to
"reality", since they are dependant on the material world - they
would not even exist without this relationship. The photograph,
however, is as equally dependant on technical apparatus as it is
on human decisions; thus, the question of the representation of
"reality" arises; or, put differently: which "truth" does a
photograph show?
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