Photo collection of the Leipzig trade fair office
The Leipzig Exhibition Office's photo collection is a collection of photographs on the history of the Leipzig Exhibition Center . It contains recordings from the turn of the century to 1964.
history
In August 1916, the Saxon Ministry of the Interior granted the “Messamt für die Mustermessen in Leipzig” legal capacity as a registered association. The office was active from February 1917, in 1921 it was converted into a corporation under public law and in 1926 it was renamed " Leipziger Messeamt ". This trade fair office was supposed to maintain and promote the trade fairs that take place twice a year in Leipzig, in which advertising and public relations played a major part. A committee for press affairs was set up as early as 1917. Right from the start he was keen to use the works of freelance writers for reporting and to collect images from well-known artists and photographers .
These materials were to be used, among other things, for the trade fair's own newspaper, which was initially titled Die Leipziger Mustermesse and was published as the Messamtliche Wirtschafts- und Exportzeitung from 1923 . They were also made available to the general press for use in their reporting. In the spring of 1918 there were around 350 daily newspapers and specialist magazines in the press distribution list. The exhibition office took account of the increasing demand for pictures, especially from magazines, and the need for material for advertising and increasingly collected photographs: In 1929, the photo collection already had 6410 original photos. They were used for press publications, but also for the production of slides for slide shows . From around the mid-1920s, the number of photos received rose sharply; it reached its peak in the period from 1935 to 1941.
The photo archive of the Leipzig trade fair office was transferred to an alternative location in Geithain during the Second World War . About 4000 pictures are said to have been lost there.
In total, the collection still comprises 17,295 pictures, most of them as paper prints or positives in the formats 13 × 18 and 18 × 24 cm . Contact prints and negatives are only available in individual cases.
The State Archive in Leipzig took over in the late 1970s, the business records that document collection and photo collection of the Fair Office. The paper pictures in the collection were mounted on cardboard. The photo index that was taken over at that time, which was handwritten until 1922 and then increasingly in typescript , was divided into the main groups General recordings, recordings from the sample fair, technical fair and building fair and other fair exhibitions. The State Archives largely adopted this structure. When the card index was later to be digitized, it was found that the index cards generally contained significantly less information than the drawn and annotated photos, so that these prints often had to be used when entering into the PC . Difficulties were caused by the fact that the photographers had apparently already provided inaccurate information about their motifs. Apparently, when registering the photos, the employees of the exhibition office assigned the image titles based on their own assumptions and kept them in some cases rather imprecise. The photos were dated, however, quite precisely; The abbreviation FM for the spring fair and HM for the autumn fair was added to the year. The majority of the photos came from private photographers, press or image services, companies and the exhibition office itself contributed significantly less to the enlargement of the collection.
Marion Bähr assessed the value of the photo collection in terms of supplementing and illustrating the other materials that the Leipzig Exhibition Office collected and even said that sometimes the images are "the only evidence of certain facts" and "replace the lack of written form" could. The photos are an important primary source of the history of the trade fair industry from 1917 as well as the history of trade, business, industry and technology. They should also not be underestimated with regard to international economic policy and the history of Leipzig . A not inconsiderable portion of the photo inventory is made up of photos taken from the grounds of the Technical Fair, which was put into operation in 1920 after moving out of Barthels Hof and further redesigned in the following years. Another interesting group of photos is dedicated to the inventors' fair and documents, among other things, curiosities such as fast-swimming sandals.
Regarding the quality of the surviving photographs, Bähr wrote: “Even if the surviving photos from the exhibition office are primarily of a commercial nature, many photographs are, as a secondary aspect, shaped by the artistic language of their originator and can thus make a contribution to the history of photography in the first half of the 20th century. Names like Paul Faulstich , Eduard Krömer , Hermann Walter , Ernst Hoenisch , Ferdinand Bimpage , Emil Tiedemann and Heinrich Hoffmann stand for this . "
At the beginning of the 21st century, part of the collection was made electronically usable as part of a retro-conversion project and a finding aid for the 20202 Leipziger Messeamt inventory (I), which contains the photographs, was put online by the Leipzig State Archives.
literature
- Marion Bähr, sources on the history of the fair. The photo collection of the Leipzig Trade Fair Office 1916–1945 in the Leipzig State Archives , in: Sächsisches Archivblatt 2, 2010, pp. 2-4 ( ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) digitized version )
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Marion Bähr, sources on the history of the fair. The photo collection of the Leipzig Trade Fair Office 1916–1945 in the Leipzig State Archive , in: Sächsisches Archivblatt 2, 2010, pp. 2-4, here p. 4 ( digitized version ( memento of the original from July 21, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. )
