Information about institution

Alinari 24Ore SpA Photo Archive
(Fratelli Alinari )

Address: Largo Alinari 15, Florence, Italy

Tel.: +39-055-2395201

Fax: +39-055-2382857

E-mail: andrea@alinari.it

WEB-Site: http://www.alinari.com

Profile:Fratelli Alinari Archive, merged in the year 2007 with the Sole 24 Ore and it created a new company called Alinari 24 ORE. It is the oldest foundation in the world still active in the field of photography, and more generally in the sphere of the image and communication, was founded in Florence in 1852. Since 1863, headquarters have been in Via Nazionale 8 (now Largo Alinari 15), the firm was created and developed by the Alinari brothers, Leopoldo, Giuseppe and Romualdo. In 1985 the Fratelli Alinari Museum of the History of Photography, with the Library of the History of Photography, joined the original “historical” institutions, i.e. the Archives, the Art Printworks, the Publishing House and the Photographic Collection, and in 1996 their ranks were swelled by the addition of the Photographic Restoration Laboratory, set up in collaboration with the Opificio delle Pietre Dure. Today Alinari is the guardian of a photographic ‘corpus’ which has few equals (with a patrimony of its own of over 4,500,000 pictures, historical and contemporary, ranging from vintage prints, glass plate negatives to film and fotocolors), and is responsible for the management of an ongoing program of exhibitions and publishing. It can supply iconographical research services and manages both Italian and foreign photographic archives, constantly increasing its ‘image-bank’, in part already on microfiches and now also on digital supports which will be available for consultation on-line. Fratelli Alinari is a leader firm on a national and international level in the field of photography, images and therefore of communication. More info and daily news at http://www.alinari.com From 2007, two Museums of Multimedia and History of Photography are open to the public in Trieste and Firenze. Printing techniques In the Fratelli Alinari Archives specialized workers still use the old nineteenth-century artisan techniques in printing from the historical glass plate negatives. The prints, also tinted in sepia and in various monochromes (color before the invention of color), are contact printed using bromographs, creating faithful copies on high quality photographic paper, manually and one by one. The Photographic Library The Alinari Photographic Library is one of the most important centers in the world for iconographic and photographic documentation. It is used by an international public of scholars, students and professional figures in the various disciplines. In 1986 Alinari once more resumed its photographic campaigns, entrusting them to eminent professional photographers and in collaboration with the Ministry of Cultural Assets, with whom they also have an agreement for photographic coverage of Italian state museums and collections. Alinari on-line and the restoration laboratory In order to make the images available to a greater number of persons, Alinari has established an on-line search system of its photographic archives, employing a system of iconographic classification produced in collaboration with the University of Florence with over Alinari on-line 330,000 images. http://edu.alinari.it and http://business.alinari.it This service, aimed at a commercial (publishers, agencies, etc), educational (universities throughout the world) and consumer public, enables the user to search for the pictures thanks to a classification system organized in 60 primary classes, including over 7000 entries. This thesaurus, prepared in collaboration with the University of Florence, covers all branches of knowledge, including the figurative arts, science, the history of industry, landscape,astronomy, theater,sport. The Museum originals are restored, photographed, digitized and inserted in the data bank together with the historical- photographic and iconographic information required by a remote user in his search. A multimedia content has began to be placed online as well.

• De Polo  Andrea