Fratelli Alinari. Who we are

Founded in Florence in 1852, Fratelli Alinari is the oldest firm in the world working in the field of photography, the image and communication.

The birth of photography and the story of the Firm go hand in hand in their development and growth, as attested to by the immense Alinari owned fund of 4.000.000 photographs, collected in the Alinari Archives. This fund is continuously growing and, thanks to a rational policy of new acquisitions and new photographic campaigns, it ranges from daguerreotypes to modern color photos. In 1852 Leopoldo Alinari, with his brothers Giuseppe and Romualdo, founded the photographic workshop, heart of the firm that still bears his name. It was the beginning of a unique endeavor that specialized in photographic portraiture, views of works of art and historical monuments, and achieved immediate national and international renown. Today the name of Alinari guarantees a century of experience and state of the art professional technology. In 2001 the Digital Archive was inaugurated. It continues to grow and progress constantly with images that can be consulted on line. Today there are over 200,000 pictures available on the Alinari Archives business site and 100,000 in the EDUCATION section. Alinari is a leader in Photographic Publishing, and its Art Printworks or Art Printworks is the only one in the world still using the artisan technique of collotype on paper and on silver plate from photographic images. Alinari is an irreplaceable point of reference for preserving, cataloguing, circulating and handing down, through the photograph, the history, society, art and culture of Italy and Europe.

ALINARI PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES

The archives are the heart of the Fratelli Alinari firm. It is here that the immense patrimony of portraits and documentary material pertaining to the art, history, folklore, landscape, industry and society of Italy, Europe and the rest of the world, from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present, is housed.
Through a series of new color and black/white photographic campaigns the Archive nucleous has been continuously enriched. Recently, besides the extraordinary archive holding such Alinari, Anderson, Brogi, Chauffourier, Fiorentini and Mannelli, some other glass-plate negatives and film from the Wulz, Michetti, Nunes Vais, Bombelli, Mollino, Betti-Borra, Zannier, Pozzar, Balocchi, Vannucci-Zauli, Unterveger, Tuminello, Muzzani, Miniati, Trombetta, Panatta collections and the Villani archive of Bologna composed of 600,000 images from a period ranging from 1914 to 1980, have been added. Pictures of works of art owned by the Italian state are available thanks to the kind permission of the MINISTRY FOR CULTURAL ASSETS AND ACTIVITIES. Alinari directly takes care of rights in conformity with the Ronchey law. The new photographic campaigns in color continue to enrich an archive that so far contains over 2,350,000 acquisitions of historical negatives, on glass plate and film, in varying format, in black and white. New additions to the photographic fund include 400,000 color photos, 350,000 other latter-day photographic prints and 900,000 vintage prints that bring the total of pictures owned by Alinari to 4,000,000.

RAPPRESENTED ARCHIVES
To be added to this fund are the 45,000,000 photos managed or represented. The Istituto Luce with over 350,000 photos and the Photographic Archive of the Touring Club Italiano, 400,000 photos. Further agreements for representation exist today with the Roger Viollet archive 7,000,000 photos, the Courtauld Institute archive 2,500,000 photos, the Marburg archive 1,500,000 photos, the Bridgeman/Giraudon archive 200,000 photos, the Interfoto archive 8,000,000 photos, the Rizzoli archive 15,000 photos, the Artothek archive 22,000 photos, the Finsiel archive 5,000 photos, the Imagno Archive, 1,000,000 photos, the Topfoto archive, 12,000,000 photos, the Bildarchiv Monheim, 25,000 photos, the Ullstein-Bild, 12,000,000 photos, the Rai Teche archive with 32,700 photos and the Ansa archive.

CONTATTI