Mirco Melone examines this change of perspective in his study Zwischen Bilderlast und Bilderschatz on the Ringier Bildarchiv in Switzerland. Scholarly interest in these archives can be linked to a recent, more complex approach to news photos that describes them, as Thierry Gervais explains, ‘no longer as simple and truthful reflections of reality but as the result of the collaboration that took place in the newsroom.’ 4 At the beginning of this century, many press photo repositories lost their original function and were transformed into historical archives and historical image banks. 2 Press photo archives are, as Alison Nordström writes in relation to the Magnum Archive, ‘simple repositories of visual reference materials that had been produced as part of doing business and preserved so that they could be used again.’ 3 They originated from the interaction between publishers, (photo) editors, journalists, photographers and photo agencies and thus represent both the complex practice of photojournalism and the image industry in the twentieth century. In recent studies the importance of analogue press photo archives for the historiography of photojournalism has been highlighted. This biography serves as the first step in that research.
#Photopress journal of the west archive
Although ‘Spaarnestad’ is now a household name among users of historical images, the way in which the photo archive functioned within the publishing company and reflected the prevailing photographic practice has hardly been investigated. 1920-1970) - and is exemplary for the development of the image industry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The collection represents a specific episode in the history of photojournalism - the heyday of the illustrated magazines (ca. The photo archive originated as a picture library in the 1920s and was transformed in the 1980s into a historical image archive. The core is formed by the editorial archive of De Spaarnestad, the most important Dutch publisher of illustrated magazines in the twentieth century. The Spaarnestad Collection in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague is the largest and most diverse analogue press photo archive in the Netherlands. A biography of, in this case, the Spaarnestad Collection, provides scholars with the relevant context to use these photos as historical sources and underlines the importance of the collection as a resourceful archive. As a result, the original photos, which formed the basis of every publication in the twentieth century, are now available to researchers. Through digitisation, many analogue press photo archives, which previously had a utilitarian function as a company archive, have entered the public domain as a historical image bank. In the origins, development and structure of the archive, as well as in the physical aspects and mutual coherence of the photos themselves, Spaarnestad’s role in the history of both photojournalism and the image industry is contained. This article presents a biography of the Spaarnestad Collection in the National Archives, the largest analogue press photo archive in the Netherlands, originating from De Spaarnestad, a major publisher of illustrated magazines.
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