Royal Prussian Messbild-Anstalt

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Seal of the Royal Prussian Messbild-Anstalt

The Königlich Preussische Messbild-Anstalt was founded in April 1885 and was the first picture agency in the German-speaking area. The institution is closely linked to the activities of its founder and long-time director Albrecht Meydenbauer and his approach to photogrammetry . This institution in the Prussian Ministry of Culture was the first in the world to deal professionally with photogrammetry.

history

Limburg Cathedral , photo taken by the Messbild-Anstalt from 1899

On the one hand, Albrecht Meydenbauer pursued the goal of architecturally precisely documenting artistically significant buildings and, on the other hand, the establishment of a comprehensive monument archive . This photogrammetric archive was intended to include the most important cultural heritage items so that they could be reconstructed in the event of destruction. From 1885 until his retirement in 1909, Meydenbauer's management took about 11,000 measurement images of almost 1,200 structures, some of which no longer exist today. In addition, around 1,600 photographs of 100 buildings in Germany outside of Prussia were taken. About 800 recordings were made on research trips abroad, mainly in Athens , Baalbek (Lebanon) and Istanbul . After Meydenbauer retired, his employees continued his work. By 1920 almost 20,000 glass negatives in the format 30 × 30 cm and 40 × 40 cm had been collected from more than 2,600 objects at home and abroad. The Messbildanstalt collection provided the starting point for the first volumes of the Deutsche Lande - Deutsche Kunst series , one of the most important German-language photo book series, which appeared from 1926 to 1985.

Due to the deteriorating economic situation, the Messbild-Anstalt was closed in 1921. The archive was taken over by the Staatliche Bildstelle Berlin, under whose name the Messbild-Anstalt was continued. Until 1933 it was located in the former building of Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Bauakademie . With the incorporation into the Staatliche Bildstelle a change of the task took place: measuring pictures were only produced in exceptional cases, while now also "works of sculpture , painting and the arts and crafts [...] were documented photographically". The work was discontinued in 1943 and the archive was moved to another location. After confiscation in 1945 and transfer to Moscow , most of the 935 wooden boxes in the collection came back to East Berlin in 1958 and in 1959 went to the Art History Image Department at the Institute for Art History at Humboldt University in Berlin. In 1968 this part of the collection was incorporated into the GDR Institute for the Preservation of Monuments , Department of Measurement Image. In the course of this, a new photogrammetric image center was founded, which was called the "measuring image center" in the tradition of the previous institution. The task of providing photogrammetric services for the preservation of monuments was resumed accordingly, with great benefit for the restoration of the historical monuments in the GDR . In 1991 the collection was transferred to the Brandenburg State Office for Monument Preservation .

literature

  • Albrecht Meydenbauer: A German monuments archive (Monumenta Germaniae). In: Deutsche Bauzeitung, No. 28, 1894, pp. 629–631.
  • Albrecht Meydenbauer: The memorial archive and its production using the measurement image process. Memorandum 1896. Reprinted with commentary by Rudolf Meyer, German Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Berlin 1993, 16 pp.
  • Albrecht Meydenbauer: A German Monuments Archive. A final word on the twentieth anniversary of the Königliche Messbild-Anstalt in Berlin. Messbild-Anstalt, Berlin 1905.
  • Ursula von den Driesch:  Meydenbauer, Albrecht. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-00198-2 , p. 286 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Armbruster, Walter EA: Bridges of Memory - Thoughts on the 75th anniversary of the death of my great-grandfather Albrecht Meydenbaur. In: Architectural photogrammetry yesterday - today - tomorrow. Eds. Jörg Albertz u. Albert Wiedemann, Technical University Berlin, 1987, pp. 15-27.
  • Koppe, Reiner: On the history and the current status of the measurement image archive. In: Architectural photogrammetry yesterday - today - tomorrow. Eds. Jörg Albertz u. Albert Wiedemann, Technical University Berlin, 1987, pp. 41-57.
  • Blachut, Teodor J .: The early days of photogrammetry. In: History of Photogrammetry. News from the mapping and surveying system, special issue, Frankfurt am Main, 1988, pp. 17–62.
  • Jörg Albertz: Albrecht Meydenbauer - Pioneer of Photogrammetric Documentation of the Cultural Heritage. In: Proceedings 18th International Symposium CIPA 2001 Potsdam (Germany), September 18-21, 2001.
  • Christof Claser, Georg Götz: Lothar Klimek's photographs of Northwest Germany. The book series "Deutsche Lande - German Art". In: Bernd Küster (Ed.): “I just see differently.” Photography in northwest Germany in the 20th century. Bremen 2006, pp. 198-227.
  • Richard Schneider: Bamberg around 1900. Bamberg 2007.

References and comments

  1. ^ Based on : Richard Schneider: Bamberg um 1900. Bamberg 2007, p. 99.

Web links

Commons : Königlich Preußische Messbildanstalt  - Collection of images, videos and audio files