Greven Archiv Digital

The Irene und Sigurd Greven Stiftung is a foundation devoted to conserving and publishing image holdings from Cologne, the Rhineland and NRW. A central project is the Greven Archiv Digital, a growing online archive comprising several hundreds of thousands of photographs from press, church and business archives as well as from photographers’ living legacies and bequests. One focus is formed by the press photography archive of the Kölnische Rundschau, whose prints and negatives have been digitalized and made accessible since 2020.

All Rundschau holdings are not only conserved digitally and in analogue form, but simultaneously made accessible to a wide public in the digital portal. Carrying over the originally analogue filing systems into the digital realm opens up new forms of research, visualizes transformations from the print to the digital reproduction and enables open dealing with historical press photographs. Precisely this switchover from archive to portal offers particular starting points for artistic approaches. The photographs range from the post-war period to the 1990s and document politics, urban development, worlds of work and everyday life, culture and sport. Alongside familiar motifs, the holding comprises numerous previously unregarded series that enable new interpretations of urban and societal history.

For Artist Meets Artist #5 we are looking forward to applicants who work with documentary visual material, are keen to reflect on the transformation from analogue archive to digital image space, or are looking to try out alternative approaches.

Irene und Sigurd Greven Stiftung / Greven Archiv Digital
Neue Weyerstraße 1-3
50676 Köln
Website