Even during his lifetime, the photographer with a doctorate in law Erich Salomon ‒ accepted as an equal by powerful figures in politics, culture and society ‒ earned unusual success and recognition for his work as a photographic journalist. The son of an upper bourgeois-Jewish family in Berlin became a star reporter at the Ullstein publishing house almost overnight in 1928, when his first secretly taken reportages from the law courts became known. Soon afterwards, he enjoyed success with previously unseen images from the world of political conferences.
The photographic estate of the famous photo journalist constitutes one of the most extensive and prominent complexes within the photographic collection of the Berlinische Galerie. It contains glass and film negatives, slides, and above all vintage prints, but also examples of printed works and documents on the photographer's life and œuvre. All in all there are over 10,000 photographs, negatives and archive items in the Erich Salomon Archive.
Over the decades, its scientific assessment and indexing has moved from index cards to simple word-processing lists to Excel-files. In recent years it has been possible to transpose a large number of index cards and older file formats into MuseumPlus.
The aim of the digitalisation was to supplement the existing sets of data with high-quality scans of the photographic prints and documentary material.
Works by Erich Salomon
in our Collection Online
