Fratelli Alinari
Fratelli Alinari is the world's oldest photographic firm, founded in Florence, Italy in 1852. Its archives contains 5.5 million photographs, ranging from daguerreotypes to modern digital photos from around the world.
Founding
In 1852, Leopoldo Alinari, with his brothers Giuseppe and Romualdo, founded the photographic workshop specializing in photographic portraiture, photos of art and historical monuments
Today
It is the oldest foundation in the world still active in the field of photography, and more generally in the sphere of the image and communication, was founded in Florence in 1852. Today Alinari is the guardian of a photographic corpus which has few equals (with a patrimony of its own of over 5,500,000 pictures, historical and contemporary, ranging from vintage prints, glass plate negatives to film and fotocolors), and is responsible for the management of an ongoing program of exhibitions and publishing. It can supply iconographical research services and manages both Italian and foreign photographic archives, constantly increasing its "image-bank", in part already on microfiches and now also on digital supports which will be available for consultation on-line. Fratelli Alinari is a leader firm on a national and international level in the field of photography, images and therefore of communication. Alinari provides photographic publishing and its Art Printworks still uses the artisan technique of collotype on paper and silver plates from photographic images.
From 2007, the Museum of Multimedia and History of Photography (MNAF) is open to the public in Florence, Italy,[1] providing a special service on photographic exhibitions, permanent show of material about the history of photography, and education/training services for students and people with disabilities (there is a section with 3D images where blind people can touch 3D artifacts and understand the images in a unique way).
- Alinari on-line and the restoration laboratory
In order to make the images available to a greater number of persons, Alinari has established an on-line search system of its photographic archives, employing a system of iconographic classification produced in collaboration with the University of Florence with over Alinari on-line 330,000 images. 400 new images are added online daily. The digitization process is done after a careful content selection and digitization work done using a Kodak EverSmart Supreme flatbed scanner and a Leaf/Mamiya 80 megapixels Aptus II 12 80 digital camera back. Color correction is done using Eizo monitors through a fully calibrated system. Color profiling is done using Adobe '98 color space.
- European Projects
In 1994 the firm began numerous initiatives for collaboration in technological and cultural projects in Europe. Among the most important are Aquarelle, Artline, Victor, Imprimatur, aceMedia, Euridice, 2Kan, Orpheus, Ermione, RegNet, TNT, Migrator 2000, eCHASE, aceMedia, Multimatch and today: MILE, Tripod, Eurogene, Fotomemoria, CITER and today GLOCAL, VisitoTuscany, CONVERGENCE, Paths, Decipher, Glocal and today BBinding, EuropeanaPhotography and Ambrosia. The Archive is today very active in Italy and Europe in several research and education research and marketing validation project, providing valuable contribution mainly in the following domains: watermarking, digital rights management, content provider, 2D-3D applications, image enhancement, intelligent content retrieval, web semantic and ontologies, distance learning, preservation and image restoration, validation, testing, mobile .app, exploitation, multimedia content supply.[2]
References and notes
External links
Media related to Fotografia Alinari at Wikimedia Commons