The Picture Archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

The Picture Archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library) currently comprises more than 17 million images. The greatest part of these are photos of a predominantly documentary character. The archive therefore counts among the greatest collections of its kind within a public institution situated in a German-speaking country.

The Picture Archive was founded around 1985 at first as a collection of portraits, in which portraits from the most diverse parts of the library were gathered together. The collection was greatly expanded by the acquisition of various photo archives, including a part of the Heinrich Hoffmann photo archive. In 2019 the image archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek was significantly expanded by the acquisition of the analogue photo archive of the news magazine STERN with more than 15 million photos from the years 1948 to 2001.

The emphasis of the collection is on:

Bavaria: personages, buildings, places, landscapes, historical and cultural events, ethnography
The Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, Post-War Period
Photographs of the magazine STERN (1948-2001)
Portraits and prospects from the fields of music, Orient/Asia and Eastern Europe, complementing the respective special collections.

On bavarikon over 90,000 digitised images from the substantial holdings of the picture archive, from the collection of portraits and prospects as well as from the numerous photo archives are searchable.

The collections of the Picture Archive continue to be expanded and are updated once a year on bavarikon.

The objects of the collection "Picture Archive" available on bavarikon

Departments in the collection "Picture Archive" of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

To the collections by signature group of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek