The Photography Collection of the Museum Ludwig
The Museum Ludwig holds an outstanding collection of photographs encompassing some 70,000 works from the beginning of photography in the nineteenth century to the present. Starting in 2017, parts of the Photographic Collection will be showcased in a special Photography Room within the permanent collection of the Ludwig Museum in an effort to gradually present the collection. The room provides the Museum Ludwig with a permanent space dedicated to photography.
To expand our exhibition area, we are also simultaneously opening the FOTO LAB, a space in which children and adults can participate and experiment. Visitors will be able to experience how a camera obscura—the original camera—works, pose in front of a photo mural, or put together their own exhibition using fifty reproductions from the Photographic Collection. These reproductions were provided by Pixum, an online photo service based in Cologne. This space will animate the Museum Ludwig’s Photographic Collection in a number of ways while also making it more accessible.
The Photography Collection goes digital
The digitization of the collection in a scholarly database for researchers is another important part of the work of the museum’s Photography Collection. Thanks to the constant generous support of Pixum, the Museum Ludwig has been able to digitize about 5,000 photographs from the Agfa Collection in the last four years. The Photographic Collection will be published sequentially, in sections, at www.museum-ludwig.kulturelles-erbe-koeln.de, making it accessible to everyone. At the moment, the digitization will continue with the estate of the photographer Eva Siao.
Explore the Collection!
In our Study Room, visitors can view works from the Photographic and Graphic collections upon notice in advance. We ask for a lead time of four weeks, although we also try to accommodate submissions at short notice.
This offer is addressed to anyone interested, from scholars to amateurs. Simply send us an email to studienraummuseum-ludwig.de to place an appointment.
The History of the Photography Collection
The Museum Ludwig preserves one of Europe’s largest and most significant collections of nineteenth and twentieth-century photography. From the outset it was above all dedicated collectors who contributed to its diversity and quality. Just one year after the founding of the Museum Ludwig in 1976, for instance, the cornerstone of the present Photography Collection was laid with the purchase of works from the L. Fritz Gruber Collection. This nucleus was then continually expanded through further donations from the couple L. Fritz and Renate Gruber. Gruber fostered first-rate contacts to photographers in Germany and abroad and, as the organizer of the photokina-Bilderschauen (photokina photo exhibitions), helped to bring their work to public attention after the collapse of the National Socialist dictatorship.
Together with the collections of the Agfa Photo-Historama, the photographer Robert Lebeck, and Daniela Mrazkova, as well as a large body of Russian photographs of the 1920s and 1930s on loan from the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation, the Photography Collection of the Museum Ludwig incorporates early daguerreotypes, unique incunabula from the nineteenth century, major artistic photographs, albums, and portfolios, as well as wide-ranging materials on the cultural history of the medium. The photographer Robert Lebeck, for example, amassed nineteenth-century photographs and albums on a large scale—including numerous travel photographs—that have been housed in the Museum Ludwig since 1994. And, at the outset of the twentieth century, the photography historian Erich Stenger began systematically collecting photographs and historical materials on photography, such as caricatures and books. These were purchased by Agfa in 1955 and presented at the Agfa Foto-Historama Museum on the Bayer/Agfa factory premises in 1974. A recognized “national treasure,” the collection was acquired by the Museum Ludwig in 2005.
A first-rate expansion of the Russian Avant-Garde collection area was made possible with the purchase of the Daniela Mrazkova Collection in 2008. Regular special exhibitions make the Photographic Collection in the Museum Ludwig accessible.
In recent decades the collection has been brought up to date through purchases and gifts, including works by Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Wolfgang Tillmans, Christopher Williams, and Sherrie Levine, to name only a few.
All works in the museum's collections have to undergo conservational manners on a regular basis. Photographic works are extremely sensitive to light and can only be on display for three months, before they have to be taken back to storage where they recover. These phases of recovery can take up to five years.
We do our best to present a selection of works from the photographic collection in the permanent collection and in special exhibitions regularly.
