• Fred Truyen

KU Leuven

When the partners in EuropeanaPhotography embarked on the journey to digitize over 400.000 early photographs for Europeana, few would realize that their very concept of the photograph would change forever. 

While sifting through often unseen and unpublished photos from Europe's top collections, a fascination grew among the collaborators of the involved musea, archives and photo-agencies for what was captured on these dusty glass negatives, daguerreotype plates and albumen prints ranging from 1839 to 1939.

What was there was not only revealed through the digitization, but urrevocably reframed into an new visual experience. Questions about the very nature of what in the end the elusive "photo as object" is, and its ramifications for archival practices, became unavoidable. In this talk, looking through the lenses of old photographers who were priviliged wittnesses of Europe's history, we will zoom in on different aspects from a Digital Humanities perspective: curation, digitization, metadata provision, rendering and digital preservation.