Deutsche Fotothek (Dresden, Germany)

The Deutsche Fotothek is a picture library in Dresden, Germany, located in the Saxon State Library. It holds more than two million images. Its strengths are in art, architecture, music, geography, technology, the economy, and the Saxony region. Its collection came from institutions, companies and individuals such as Hermann Krone.

With the Archiv der Fotografen — Archive of Photographers, the Deutsche Fotothek offers a virtual storefront for the works of important German photographers - from the collection of the Deutsche Fotothek in the SLUB Dresden and from the collections of our partners.

In addition, you are currently researching two million images from 90 institutions: Photographs, paintings, graphics as well as in our collections of Historic Maps and Architectural and Machine Drawings.

We offer you a comprehensive service for scientific and editorial use.

In view of the extensive media change from analogue to digital photography, securing and activating important testimonies of analogue photography is currently one of the most important tasks of large image archives. The Deutsche Fotothek, together with the F.C. Gundlach Foundation and other partners, takes up this challenge and, as the Archive of Photographers, assumes responsibility for the cultural heritage handed down in the form of photographic works and bequests.

We see ourselves as a point of contact for photographers and their descendants; we preserve and activate archives of photographers or mediate them to suitable locations in cooperation with a network of photographic institutions.

In addition, the virtual Archive of the Photographers serves as a showroom for the diversity and significance of German photography, making the visual heritage inherited from their own collections and those of the cooperating collections visible online.

Founded in 1924, the Deutsche Fotothek is a universal cultural history archive with a total holdings of around five million images. It offers a wide range of subjects with a focus on photography, art, architecture and the history of technology.
In addition to the Archiv der Fotofgrafen — Archive of Photographers, the portal Weltsichten — Worldviews, the Kartenforum — Map Forum as an information portal of libraries, museums and archives managed by the Deutsche Fotothek and funded by the DFG, as well as the extensive collection of Architectural and Machine Drawings from more than 20 collections deserve special mention.

The aim of the Deutsche Fotothek's collection and indexing activities is to provide research and teaching, the press and publishing houses - in short: anyone interested - with comprehensive and well-founded photographic material in association with institutional partners.

As an institution of the SLUB Dresden, the Deutsche Fotothek is connected to one of the three German digitisation centres and has an excellent IT infrastructure including SAN mass storage system and long-term archiving procedures.