Vorbilder Nachbilder. Die fotografische Lehrsammlung der Universität der Künste Berlin 1850–1930

“Paragons and Afterimages” – the pair of terms points to relationships between images, but also to their production, in which recourse is had to images that already exist. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photographs served in art academies and schools of applied art as “sources” or “models” and functioned as a special didactic type of image. Photographic sources were important aids in the creative practice of budding artists and accordingly generated “after-images”: paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints. The archive of the Universität der Künste Berlin has preserved a photographic teaching collection that was assembled at its predecessor institutions, the Berliner Kunstakademie and the leading Kunstgewerbeschule, and that goes back to the 1850s. With approximately 25,000 individual photographic sheets, to which portfolios and albums must be added, this collection is unique in Germany. Long given little attention, it has been catalogued and researched in archival and scholarly terms in recent years. In this book and with the exhibitions prepared by the Münchner Stadtmuseum, the collection is being presented for the first time. Among the extremely varied pictorial motifs are reproductions of works of art, landscapes, nature studies of water, clouds, trees, plants, rocks etc., architecture, still lifes with fruit, glasses etc., portraits, genre scenes, tableaux vivants, nudes and animal studies as well as orientalist and history subjects. The studies made as sources – widespread in France as “Études d’après nature” – are by well-known European and American photographers, among them: Fratelli Alinari, Ottomar Anschütz, Karl Blossfeldt, Adolphe Braun, Eugène Cuvelier, Georg Maria Eckert, Constantin Famin, Wilhelm von Gloeden, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Jakob August Lorent, Gustave le Gray, James Robertson, Henry Peach Robinson, Giorgio Sommer, Carleton Watkins.

Exhibitions:
Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Fotografie, 7/2 – 26/7/2020
Museum für Fotografie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, 26/11/2020 – 5/9/2021