The German Documentation Center for Art History (German: Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte; DDK) was founded as Bildarchiv Foto Marburg in 1913 under the aegis of art historian Richard Hamann (1879–1961) at Philipps-Universität Marburg. It is a documentation and research institute for visual cultural assets, since 2009 established as a university center. DDK holds one of the largest scholarly image collections focusing on art history and archaeology in the world and is an outstanding and renowned institution in the field of art-historical services and research. Active in Germany and internationally, DDK is tasked with documenting Europe’s monumental cultural heritage for scientific purposes and enabling access to it with the aid of cutting-edge media technologies. To this end, top-grade photographs are produced in-house or acquired from third parties, scientifically analyzed in accordance with recognized standards and made available to researchers as well as the interested public. The focus is on objects examined within the field of art history and its related disciplines, e.g. archaeology; these are in particular: architectural monuments, furnishings and movable art objects from national and international public and private collections. Unique in the sense of its historically grown holdings, DDK has been a point of reference in the field of documentation methods and IT/data processing solutions for decades and is among those institutions that set professional standards in handling primary information in the area of cultural studies. Its key role in terms of making art-historical primary information accessible to the public is evident, among others, in intensive long-term collaborations with German and international institutes devoted to the preservation and documentation of visual cultural assets. According to its history and fields of activity, DDK is further tasked to conduct research on all aspects of how visual cultural heritage is passed on, with a specific focus on the media and history of science, as well as on the documentation and interpretation of works of art and architecture. The research results are presented in the form of academic events and publications. DDK’s program for the coming years centers on how things are visually handed down in light of the accompanying media-related transformations of the visual. This focal point includes the political instrumentalization and social evaluation of works of art and architecture as well as their visual representations. A second important focus is on selection, distinction and amplification, i.e. the process of canonization as part of social value formation, that take place in the course of passing on cultural assets. In 2025, we will move into a new building in Marburg that has been specially constructed for our needs.
At DDK 2.2 million original photographs (negatives, diapositives, and digital photographs) are administered from all photographic eras since around 1860. They are stored under continually optimized conditions and are kept accessible. DDK’s collections document art and architecture from all epochs in Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Switzerland, the Baltic region, Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey, Egypt, Armenia, Portugal, Slovakia, and other countries. Its holdings are extremely valuable with regard to both the buildings and artworks documented and the photographic objects themselves, many of them being unique depictions of monuments and artworks that have been destroyed. The photos deserve acknowledgement not least as individual testimonies of their respective aesthetic view. Some 1.4 million photographs have been catalogued in the database to date. The analogue specimens in the collection are successively being digitized. The inventory is continually strategically expanded by acquisitions of historical photographic archives, gifts and bequests, permanent loans and DDK’s own campaigns. Moreover, cutting-edge digital photography methods serve to expand the collection, as do cooperations with other visual documentation institutes. Today some 80 partner institutions supply digital images and analytical information to the central in-house specialized network database “Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur” (Image Index of Art and Architecture), which is run by the documentation center and is freely accessible online (www.bildindex.de). DDK also publishes its holdings in this database.