Peripheral holdings: the Croquison Donation

The photographs from the Croquison Donation lie somewhat on the periphery of the Photothek's holdings in terms of their subjects, but are of particular interest nonetheless. The aim of the project is to reconstruct the biographies of individual photographs in the Croquison Donation and investigate the history of their incorporation into the Photothek classification system.

On 23 November 1967 a donation from the Belgian scholar of Byzantine and medieval art, Benedictine Father Joseph Croquison (1890–1977), was registered in the Photothek inventory book. The donation comprises 61 photographs (inv. nos. 228222 to 228282), almost all of which show monuments from the eastern Mediterranean sphere, including from Cairo, Philae, Petra, Baalbek, Istanbul, Jerusalem and Athens. Since the objects in these pictures fall outside the main spectrum of the Photothek's collection, the photographs were archived in the "Antiquity" section as being geographically the most appropriate, even if only about half of the depicted objects may be considered antique. The photographs are interesting not only for their subjects but also because of their early date, since they were taken in the 1860s–1870s. They thus document the monuments in a state in which Father Croquison, on his own trip to the "Orient" (e.g. in 1953, to Egypt), could no longer have seen them.