Photography in the Royal Danish Library's collections
The Royal Danish Library has collected photography for over 100 years. In the finest part of the collection, The National Collection of Photography, there are gems from the entire life of the medium.
The Royal Danish Library has been collecting photography for more than 100 years to preserve the explosively growing image culture. The Collection of Prints and Photographs contains approximately 18 million physical images. It continues to be supplemented, but the largest approach is through the online archive, which collects the Danish part of the internet.
The National Collection of Photography
The jewel in the collection is the National Collection of Photography, which contains around 50,000 photographs, of which approximately 20,000 have been digitised. The collection is one of Northern Europe's finest collections of photography from the entire lifespan of the medium, from the earliest daguerreotypes to today's contemporary art. The collection contains roughly 50,000 works, of which 20,000 are available in Digital collections.
In the foreign collection, there are significant works by names such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Maxime Du Camp, Roger Fenton, Julia Margaret Cameron, OG Rejlander, John Thomson, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Erich O. Salomon, August Sander, Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Klein, Richard Avedon, Duane Michals, Joel-Peter Witkin, David Goldblatt, Tracey Moffatt, Martin Parr, Nan Goldin, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer, Paul Graham and Shirana Shahbazi.
In the Danish collection, there are large collections of names such as Jette Bang, Helmer Lund Hansen, Jesper Høm, Viggo Rivad, Gregers Nielsen, Tove Kurtzweil, Jørgen Schytte, Marianne Grøndahl, Krass Clement, Kirsten Klein, Per Bak Jensen, Joachim Koester, Olafur Eliasson, Ann Lislegaard, Joachim Ladefoged, Søren Lose, Ebbe Stup Wittrup, Katya Sander, Trine Søndergaard, Nikolai Howalt and Astrid Kruse Jensen.