Florence, here is the Alinari Foundation: the historic photographic archive is now everyone's heritage

The Alinari Foundation, which will manage theAlinari archives, one of the largest and most famous in the world, was presented to the press this morning: the archive was acquired in December 2019 by the Region of Tuscany, which saved it from dispersion and dismemberment and gave it a home, Villa Fabbricotti, where the entire archives will soon be housed. It is a heritage of more than five million pieces, including photographs, documents, specialized books and historical technical equipment, to which almost 260,000 digital images have now been added. The photographic material (4,950,000 pieces) consists of 1,650,000 black-and-white film negatives, 470,000 collodion and gelatin glass plate negatives, 700,000 images representing the holdings of photo libraries, and 420,000 color slides. The remaining 50,000 items are divided among books and magazines (25,000), art print shop pieces (26,000) and photographic equipment (400 items).

The Tuscany Region will ensure the preservation and its future usability and accessibility of the Alinari heritage: in order to manage it in the best possible way, in July 2020, the Region of Tuscany created the FAF Toscana - Fondazione Alinari per la Fotografia, which today, Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2021, finally presents itself to the public, with its president, Giorgio van Straten, and its director, Claudia Baroncini; with a venue, Villa Fabbricotti, which will soon be able to house the entire archive; its first successes, the winning of a Ministry Call for Proposals to award funding for the restoration and digitization of unique pieces; and many plans for the future, first and foremost an exhibition venue, to display part of the collection and organize temporary exhibitions. Exhibitions that while waiting for the museum, the Foundation will propose elsewhere already this year.

“Today a whole new chapter of a great story officially opens,” comments the president of Tuscany, Eugenio Giani. “The Alinari Foundation for Photography restores life to a photographic heritage of inestimable value, both historically and culturally, on a regional, national and international level. Thanks to the political and cultural operation initiated by the Region that culminated in the creation of the Alinari Foundation, we are now able to make available to everyone, citizens, scholars, and researchers, the story of 150 years of our history through documents of great value and beauty and to promote the knowledge of a heritage that is a unique historical source. Not only that, the Foundation’s tasks also include promoting the culture of the photographic image through the proposed discussion on the role of photography as a language of modernity. We proudly welcome to Tuscany a reality that can best interpret the social function of photography, its being an agent of history, social cohesion, identity and memory.”

“An archive should, first of all, be preserved and enhanced,” says Giorgio van Straten, president of the Foundation. “And this is where we started with our first project on the restoration and digitization of the collection’s daguerreotypes, which participated in the Ministry’s call for proposals, obtaining the highest contribution. On this road we will continue, also because of the great interest that La Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze has shown in this aspect of our activity. But it would be wrong to consider the foundation’s photographic heritage only a collection of art objects. Photographs are a tool for telling the world of the past and the world of the present, and this idea of storytelling will be the basis of many of our initiatives.”

“One of the main goals of the Foundation,” says Claudia Baroncini, director of the FAF, “is to reach out and involve the widest and most diverse public possible in its activities, through educational programs for schools, families and adults, and cultural mediation projects for communities, making the Alinari heritage accessible and understandable to all. The ambition is also to transform the archive into an authoritative, lively and relevant place for education on photography, making materials, tools, knowledge and skills available to students, professionals and enthusiasts.”

Fratelli Alinari, The three Alinari brothers Giuseppe, Leopoldo and Romualdo (1860)

The history of the Alinari Archives

The history of the immense Alinari photographic heritage began in Florence, when Leopoldo Alinari founded his first photographic laboratory and set up, together with his brothers Giuseppe and Romualdo, the firm F.lli Alinari. That was in 1852: a little more than ten years later, in 1863, he created the oldest photographic establishment in the world, in the palace on Via Nazionale, today Largo Alinari, which for more than 150 years has been the firm’s headquarters and in which the extremely rich photographic heritage that has come down to us, one of the largest archives in existence, was formed by sedimentation. Since then it has been a story of great success, which has led the firm to photograph, in a systematic way, Italy’s historical artistic and architectural heritage, museum collections and the landscape of our country, spreading Italian culture and art throughout the world.

The crisis triggered by the Great War led to a change of ownership, which was followed by many others. In 1920 the firm passed to a group of Tuscan aristocrats, led by Baron Ricasoli; in 1957 it was owned by Senator Vittorio Cini, who acquired new photographic archives of great value such as Brogi, Anderson, Chauffourier and Fiorentini; in the mid-1970s it passed to the Milanese Zevi family, and in 1982 to the Trieste-based De Polo family, which, in addition to creating the Alinari National Museum of Photography, acquired photographic fonds in Italy and abroad, proceeding in the late 1990s to digitize and sell them. Of 2019 is the acquisition by the Region of Tuscany, which immediately activated procedures and actions to ensure the proper preservation and enhancement of the archive. The first step, on July 16, 2020, was the establishment of the FAF Toscana Fondazione Alinari per la Fotografia; the second, in December 2020, was the acquisition, after the analog heritage, of the F.lli Alinari IDEA spa and its digital heritage, consisting of an archive of 259,692 images, with related databases, the management and storage systems, the trademarks and the rights of use of the images, conferred with the rest to the FAF Toscana.

Fratelli Alinari, Camera mounted on the sixteen-meter stage from which the photographs of the Sistine Chapel were taken (1904)

The composition of the archives and the location at Villa Fabbricotti

The Alinari photographic archives can be divided into analog heritage and digital heritage. The analog patrimony consists, as estimated by the Soprintendenza Archivistica e Bibliografica della Toscana, of an overall total of 5,020,916 photographic assets, many of them unique, dating from 1840 to the present day. It consists of three main nuclei: photographic material (positives, prints and photo albums, negatives on both glass plate and film, and incunabula such as daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, ferrotypes, and other unique items); bibliographical material (a very rich specialized library, consisting of volumes, magazines and rare books from different original nuclei and to be considered among the most qualified libraries in the field in Italy and abroad); instrumental material (photographic equipment, historical atelier equipment, kits and technical instruments testifying in various ways to the use and practice of photography). Added to the three archival nuclei is the fund related to the activity of the Stamperia d’Arte Alinari, which preserves negatives, prints, commercial catalogs as well as machinery, including a valuable collotype printing machine.

The entire analog patrimony is currently stored in the warehouses of the Art Defender company in Calenzano, organized in high-security warehouses, and the verification of the material integrity of the acquired patrimony is underway, as established by regional law, an activity that will be completed next summer. This is a temporary placement, pending its relocation to Villa Fabbricotti on Via Vittorio Emanuele II in Florence, a building of historical and artistic value identified for the conservation and consultation of the Alinari heritage. Owned by the Region of Tuscany, the villa will be adapted to its new function as an archive, which is why a collaboration has already been initiated with the Archival and Bibliographic Superintendence of Tuscany and the Opificio delle pietre dure of Florence, to establish what characteristics the building should have, in order to safeguard the preservation of the heritage and allow its best usability. The archive of digitized photographic images, reproducing in particular positives belonging to Alinari funds and collections, after a complex work of transfer to the servers of the Region of Tuscany, is instead usable at www.alinari.it.

Wilhelm Von Gloeden, Cain (ca. 1900; Fratelli Alinari Museum Collections, Von Gloeden Archive)

Photography 2020 Strategy. A MiBACT grant for conservation

The Alinari Foundation for Photography participated with the project Valorization of the most important Italian collection of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and ferrotypes from the Alinari Archives in the funding notice Photography Strategy 2020-Conservation issued by the MiBACT’s Contemporary Creative General Directorate, obtaining the highest funding (amounting to 39,400.00 euros) among the 13 admitted subjects, out of a total of 122 participants. The project is dedicated to the preservation, restoration and enjoyment of the largest fund of unique photographic objects in Italy from the Alinari collections (notified by the Soprintendenza Archivistica di Firenze and now owned by the Region of Tuscany) with particular emphasis on daguerreotypes made between 1840 and 1855 ca. A partner in the project is the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, with whom operations for the conservation, restoration and high-resolution digitization of the unique objects have been established.

However, the Unique Objects collection, which can generally be described as being in good condition, includes 830 pieces on which there is damage to the mounts, while 51 objects demonstrate critical conservation issues for which restoration work has been requested at the laboratory of the Pietre Dure. Most of the objects also require cleaning and securing, including their packaging in a case or frame.

After the conservation and restoration work, the project will include the proper cataloging of the objects in Italian and English and high-resolution duplex digitization to then allow them to be viewed and enjoyed on the FAF website. These are invaluable works of early photography that, like the daguerreotype patented by Daguerre in 1839, provide a positive/negative image that cannot be reproduced and therefore does not allow for copies: unique objects made by Italian, European and American authors, most between 1840 and 1860, including a rare daguerreotype with Florence under snow, the oldest existing image of the city in the world, made by scientist and director of the Specola Astronomical Observatory Giovanni Battista Amici (1786-1863) or his son Vincenzo. In addition to numerous portraits, including those of famous personalities (Gioberti, Cavour, La Marmora, Liszt, Schubert, Baudelaire), there are views of cities and landscapes (Rome, Genoa, Milan, Palermo, Pisa, Villa dEste in Tivoli, Niagara Falls, Paris), post-mortem portraits, still lifes, genre scenes, works and monuments darte.

Fratelli Alinari, La Tribuna, Uffizi Gallery, Florence (ca. 1900)

Future projects

The transition of the immense Alinari archives from private to public ownership and the subsequent emergence from the Alinari Foundation for Photography constitute, the FAF points out, a major management challenge. To accompany this moment of transition, the Photo Library of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz Max-Planck-Institut, in collaboration with the Region of Tuscany and the Alinari Foundation for Photography, organized the study day On Alinari. Archive in Transition, which involved prestigious scholars and scholars in a dialogue with artist Armin Linke. They were asked to point to new horizons and set new research questions that can connect the past, present and future of the Alinari heritage. These talks, together with photographs and excerpts from interviews conducted by Armin Linke, are about to be published in a book of the same title (in press).

Pending a Foundation exhibition space, Alinari’s photographs will be on display around the world. Starting in summer 2021, in a journey that will touch Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, Italiae. From Alinari to the Masters of Contemporary Photography will tell the story of the fascination and diversity of Italians and Italy, its landscapes and creativity. Through the works of more than 75 photographers, an unusual visual narrative is delineated that relates different authors, techniques and subjects, with the explicit intention of bringing historical and contemporary photography into dialogue, by formal and content assonances or by contrasts. The exhibition will be hosted in the venues of the diplomatic-consular network and the Italian Cultural Institutes, and the international public will thus be able to get to know and retrace the junctures of a history that, starting ideally from the Alinari Archives, reaches through the great masters of twentieth-century Italian photography to contemporary experiments.

A tool for promoting the archives will also be the website, which is not only a search engine for images, the basis of the licensing activity, but also a space for information on activities and narration through photographs, which we will begin to experiment with two first photo-stories dedicated to Villa Fabbricotti and Queen Victoria who stayed there.

Fratelli Alinari, Villa Fabbricotti taken from the garden (Feb. 25, 1894)

Florence, here is the Alinari Foundation: the historic photographic archive is now everyone's heritage

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