Photo Archive Felicitas Timpe

The Munich photographer Felicitas Timpe (1923–2006) visually recorded the scientific, cultural and public life in Munich. She was the official photographer of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Bavarian Academy of Sciences) and of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste (Bavarian Academy of the Fine Arts); she also regularly worked for the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich).

Over more than 50 years, one of the largest private cultural photo archives of Germany was created. It has extraordinary importance for the Bavarian and German cultural life in those decades. The archive comprises over 1.2m b/w and colour shots from the years between 1951 and 2003.

It includes images on the themes of:

Classical music
Popular music, jazz and rock
Writers, scientists, artists, actors and directors
Cabaret, opera, theatre, and TV (studios of ARD and ZDF in Munich, i.e. the first and second state TV channels)

This photo archive provides the largest single group of images in the Picture Archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library). Both cataloguing and digitisation of the holdings have only just begun. At present, over 13,000 photos by Felicitas Timpe are searchable on bavarikon.

The objects from the photo archive Felicitas Timpe available on bavarikon

Further photo archives of the Picture Archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek:

>> This collection is part of the holdings of the Picture Archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library).