EuropeanaPhotography
EUROPEAN Ancient PHOTOgraphic vintaGe repositoRies of digitAized Pictures of Historic qualitY
EuropeanaPhotography is a digitisation project playing a key role in ensuring that digital content related to ancient photography is accessible in Europeana.
In fact, Europeana has an impressive mass of images mostly representing cultural objects while photographic images, the early ones in particular, are underrepresented. EuropeanaPhotography will fill this gap by providing photographic masterpieces from 1839, with the first example of images from Fox Talbot and Daguerre, to the beginning of the Second World War (1939).
The EuropeanaPhotography consortium puts together 19 partners coming from 13 Member States; they are private and public leading photographic agencies and cultural institutions holding important photographic collections. This public-private partnership is quite unique in the Europeana group of projects; the private partners will demonstrate how they can derive commercial value from participation in Europeana while the public ones will show how to derive benefits from their cooperation with the private sector.
The EuropeanaPhotography content providers are digitising over 430,000 photographic items for Europeana; the provided metadata will be made available in all the 11 languages spoken in the partners' countries. This core of documents will illustrate historical moments of the European life, landscapes and people, home and clothes, social and economic changes. The collections will be organised upon four main themes:
- Places (cities – as the transformation of Paris by Haussmann and of Barcelona by Gaudi -, landscape – as the country side in Europe in the 19th century);
- People (portraits as Queen Victoria, the Popes, Garibaldi, and Coco Chanel -, daily life, etc.);
- Events (political events – as la Commune de Paris -, local and civil wars, royal weddings);
- Trends or movements (industrial revolution, women's emancipation, artistic movements, geographic explorations).
Dissemination and promotion involve several activities and tools: beside the official website, EuropeanaPhotography owns a dedicated showcase inside www.digitalmeetsculture.net online magazine, and will be present in scientific publications and periodicals. The public sector of the cultural institutions and the private/commercial sector of the photographic archives are the target sectors of dissemination.