Object of the month

Transparent plastic sleeves, which have been used for decades to store slides, are now proving to be a conservation problem.

The white Kodak box camera not only represents a formative phase in Dirk Reinartz's professional career, but also the beginning of his amateur photography.

Glass plate negatives from the F.C. Gundlach archive: The portraits of Heinrich and Katharina Gundlach are not only family records, but early examples of F.C. Gundlach's photographic vision.

Martin Kippenberger's lightbox from 1989 testifies to his engagement with photography as both an artistic and commercial medium.

Our object of the month takes us back to the year 1967, when F.C. Gundlach founded Creative Colour GmbH (CC for short).

We recently found a whole box full of slides in the archive, from which we extracted a 35mm color slide. We want to take this discovery as an opportunity to reflect on the question of why so few color prints have survived from the work of many photographers who worked on commission.

The history of photographic technology has produced many curiosities. Among them is the Kodak disc, which we recently came across while working in the archives.

This month we are presenting three 35mm film canisters from the Perutz company. These historical black and white films illustrate the challenges of archiving and preserving old film materials.

We have chosen a particularly fascinating object for June: a small leather case, possibly made of elephant hide, containing a large number of small-format negatives.

While sorting and archiving numerous slides, we came across these special works. Two of the three photographs were superimposed in such a way that they created a strikingly new composition.

In 2023, a dusty cardboard box containing 118 negatives on glass plates of different sizes reached us from the French Charente region, including scenes from the life of a middle-class family.