The Photography Collection
The photography collection of the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf comprises around 3,500 photographic prints reflecting the medium’s rich diversity in all its facets from its early days to the present.
The majority of the works, just over 3,000 items, come from the former holdings of Galerie Kicken Berlin, one of the most renowned international photography galleries, and entered the Kunstpalast collection through acquisition in December 2018. On this occasion, a separate collection area devoted to photography was established at the Kunstpalast.
The works cover a wide variety ranging from minute prints, some no larger than a postage stamp, to large formats; from thin paper to sturdy cardboard; from reflective surfaces to matte finishes; from a vast array of shades of grey to radiant colours. The collection offers a profound insight into photography’s many facets and invites us to ponder visual worlds both past and present.
The holdings span approximately 150 years of photographic history. They encompass a wide range of movements of photography represented in distinct volumes, including 19th-century travel photography, Pictorialism with its emulation of painting, the New Vision and New Objectivity movements of the 1920s and 1930s, the experiments with light pursued in Subjective Photography in the 1950s, documentary and “authored” photography of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as American colour photography.
The collection features big names, such as Henry Fox Talbot, Man Ray or Bernd and Hilla Becher, alongside lesser known, at times surprising positions, captured in either individual or series of works. Apart from spanning a wide range of periods and a wealth of photographic artists, the collection also provides insight into the wide variety of applications and contexts of photography. Icons of art history are complemented and contextualised by X-ray photographs, press and advertising photographs, as well as personal snapshots.
The Kunstpalast’s photographic collection also includes the Archive of Artistic Photography of the Rhineland Art Scene (Archiv künstlerischer Fotografie der rheinischen Kunstszene / AFORK)
Image Credits
Image Credits