Photo-Archives, Old and New

The discovery in the 19th century and the subsequent impressive development of photography in the 20th century have overthrown the 400 year monopoly of engravings  for the propagation of artworks. Art historical books could be illustrated with numerous reproductions, first with black-white photographs and from the mid of the 20th century also more and more in colour. These photographs were also collected in huge 'photo-archives'.
The advent of  'digital photography', allowing unlimited pictures at no additional costs and with its powerful post-processing tools, combined with the immense possibilities of internet, is a new step in the dissemination processes of artworks.

- Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, founded in 1913
- Warburg Photographic Collection, since 1933 in London


 'SquinchPix - European Image Archive'   (1) (2).

'Bildarchiv Foto Marburg' was originally founded in 1913 by art historian Richard Hamann under the name "Photographischer Apparat“.  It is now a national and international research and service institute, supported by the Philipps University in Marburg. Read its mission statement.

With its roughly 2 million photographs, from the 1870s onwards and of many different kinds, it is one of the largest image archives on art and architecture in 13 European countries, Armenia and Egypt. It includes also the collection of 39,300 photographs of frescos and wall-decorations, many destroyed afterwards, of 485 churches, cloisters, castles and other buildings in 305 places of Austria, Check Republic, Germany, Poland and Russia, captured during an official campaign from 1943 onwards till the end of the war in May 1945. 

Window in catalogue 'themes'

The search is extremely powerful and offers search functionalities in 16 fields (Gesamtindex)  and four alphabetic catalogues allow for  retrieval according to:
'places (Orte)', 'artists' names (Künstler)', 'portraits of historic individuals (Portraits)' or 'themes (Themen)'.
The results can be sorted in several ways (by title, artist, date, ascending or descending). Display is in mosaic or in list format and a Google geo-reference map shows the location of the artwork.  
The retrieval, however, does not allow for 'relevance' and many photographs of details of the same artwork may be displayed in a list together with other artworks.The Help function is correct, but  is only available in German.

The detailed colour photographs are unique, of very high quality and can be viewed enlarged. Squinchpix's primary goal is to SHOW as clearly as possible. All pictures have a caption with the basic information, only a small subset have other scholarly references.  A Google-map tells you exactly where the photograph was taken. 

 * NEW IMAGE SETSwhich brings you to the latest groups of images added to the site, presently images from 

-San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome (36 images).  

In my post of  October 2, 2011Best practice of an online catalogue: Cat’zArts I was wondering if

'best practice' rules of online archives/collections, for end-users like me, had ever been described?

(1) Obviously, this post cannot cover all photo-archives, presently widely available on Internet. Many of them are country- or region-oriented: for instance the archive of RKD -Rijksbureau voor Kunstdocumentatie in Den Haag (NL), specialized in the art of the Low Countries but containing numerous works of other European countries as well. Most of them are 'collection-based', i.e. they belong to a museum or group of museums or to a large collection, but often include records beyond their own collection.
Among the many, one is important for both its history and its content: the Frick Art Reference Library Photoarchive in New York. The Photoarchive is a collection of more than one million photographic reproductions of works of art of over 36,000 artists from the fourth to the mid-twentieth century. There are approximately 60,000 large-format negatives, which resulted from photo-expeditions sponsored by Ms. Frick in the United States and Europe from 1920-1967. Only a small part is now listed in the Frick Library’s online catalogue FRESCO . Its Frick Digital Image Archive provides access to images of 15,000 works of art.  Unfortunately, Frick's most rare photo-archives can only be accessed through ARTstor by subscrription: they comprise  25,000 digitized negatives of works of art photographed in London auctions of Sotheby's and Christie's from 1922-1937 (A.C. Cooper Archive) and in remote sites throughout Italy during the first half of the 20th century (Sansoni Archive); another part consists of 40,000 works in American private collections and small public repositories.

A huge digital archive, recently developed on a European scale, is EUROPEANA, covering all types of arts and media. It's aim is to make available the whole of  Europe's cultural collections.

UNESCO has an Archives Portal, which gives access to websites of archival institutions around the world.

(2) The terminology used in this context is manifold:archive, collection or database? or maybe catalogue, dictionary, index, inventory...? and digital?