Library / Self-PublishedÖsterreichische Zeitschrift für VolkskundeAlbums Die ersten 1.500 Negative

Merely a Means to an End? The Early Negatives of the Volkskundemuseum Wien

The first 1,500 entries in the negative inventory – predominantly glass plates – depict ‘the rural’ in the Alpine and Danube regions between 1900 and 1938: farmhouses, village squares, traditional costumes, and sacred objects. Produced by museum staff and regional specialists, they reflect the research interests and visual aesthetics of their time. Many negatives were created as reproductions of positive images or as excerpts from publications. They served for the production of prints, slides, and printed illustrations and were long regarded merely as a means to an end. Today, however, they are increasingly valued as material objects in their own right, particularly in research contexts: retouchings, interventions, material deterioration, and traces of storage become visible in color digitizations, opening up new insights for a range of disciplines.