Cameras, film and albums shaped what people photographed and how they shared images. This collection explores the practices through which photography became a form of visual memory.
Readings to help you find your bearings.
Digital photography did more than replace film with sensors and memory. As cameras became part of connected phones and networks, images increasingly became objects of exchange. The shift changed everyday photographic practice without erasing older traditions, while renewing debates about documentation, reality, and the circulation of images.
Open storyThe move from film to digital sensors transformed photography’s support, reproduction, and circulation—and renewed debate about its value as evidence. Yet framing, light, and point of view still depend on human choices.
Open storyPhotographs, catalogues and objects can help explain how a home was arranged, but none reveals everyday life on its own. Reading their contexts, materials and traces of use allows for more grounded interpretations without confusing documentation with display.
Open storyA photograph has a medium, a process and a context. Documentation helps explain its possibilities without attributing to it what the image cannot prove.
The focus is on the production and use of photographs. Design examines their graphic integration, while Technology deals with the devices used to capture them.
Three perspectives on the archive.
Explore the equipment, lenses and controls involved in taking photographs.
Digital Photography: From the Camera to the Connected Phone Photography and video: how time transforms shared toolsFollow film from laboratory development to the preservation of the negative.
From Negative to Digital File: How Photography Changed From Film to File: How Digital Photography Changed the MediumConsider how sharing images and portraits helps build visual memory.
Reconstructing a Historic Interior Through Images, Objects and Traces of Use Photography and video: how movement turns images into timeHeisei retro brings together objects and practices from Japan between 1989 and 2019, but it belongs not only to those who lived through the era. Tamagotchi, stickers, purikura, anime and music show how a reissue can revive not just a design, but ways of playing, making and sharing.
Read articleThe chronology of images held by the Photo Library of the Spanish Cultural Heritage Institute begins in 1844.
Read articleThe Museo Arqueológico Nacional’s own photographic holdings include images produced from the museum’s creation in 1867 onward.
Read articleThe National Archaeological Museum’s photographic archive has its own collections dating from the museum’s founding in 1867, alongside materials acquired through donations and purchases.
Read articleBetween 1898 and 1954, Mariano and Vicente Moreno made more than 60,000 images related to public and private art collections, now held in the IPCE’s Moreno archive.
Read articleBetween 1927 and 1936, Portuguese photographer Antonio Passaporte made urban views, monuments and landscapes of Spain that are now part of the IPCE’s Loty archive.
Read articleHeisei retro brings together objects and practices from Japan between 1989 and 2019, but it belongs not only to those who lived through the era. Tamagotchi, stickers, purikura, anime and music show how a reissue can revive not just a design, but ways of playing, making and sharing.
In Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the peinetón turned an ornamental comb into a sign of fashion, status and belonging. Its manufacture, imagery and controversies reveal how dress made women visible—and brought their presence in the streets into question—in the 1820s and 1830s.
A historic interior cannot be reconstructed from a single photograph or inventory. Images, documents and surviving objects offer different clues about how a home was arranged, used and inhabited, while also revealing the gaps and choices that shape what can be known today.
Donated by Wulf Köpke to Madrid’s National Museum of Anthropology, a collection of 355 objects offers a way to explore rooms in a bourgeois Berlin home from the early twentieth century. Its value lies in the furniture and utensils, but also in the relationships between objects, documents and museum decisions that make it possible to reconstruct a domestic space without claiming to reproduce it completely.
Low-rise jeans and fitted clothes sum up some enduring images of the 2000s, but not a decade with a single uniform. Denim, music subcultures, celebrities and online retail show how varied styles coexisted and circulated ever more quickly.
From Buenos Aires to Montevideo, the oversized ornamental comb was more than an accessory. Its manufacture, uses and controversies reveal tensions over class, gender, politics and women’s presence in public space.
Tamagotchi, Tamamori stickers and purikura show that revisiting the past involves more than reissuing its imagery: it also means considering what people did with these objects and how they circulate today. Heisei retro brings together memory and first-time discovery without reducing the era to a single experience.
Jeans, celebrity culture, retail and the spread of the internet help explain how styles circulated in the 2000s. But runway and press images alone cannot show who wore each garment, or how often.
In Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the peinetón turned an ornamental comb into an object of fashion, status and controversy. Images and written accounts offer ways to explore who made and wore them, and how their scale shaped public life.
Photographs, catalogues and objects can help explain how a home was arranged, but none reveals everyday life on its own. Reading their contexts, materials and traces of use allows for more grounded interpretations without confusing documentation with display.
From low-rise jeans and boho style to silhouettes linked with indie music and hip-hop, 2000s fashion brought together varied trends. The internet, e-commerce and designer collaborations with mass retailers accelerated their circulation, though runway and celebrity images alone cannot represent how everyone dressed.
Canal 8’s arrival in 1960 did not immediately turn television into a private family possession. Drawing on interviews in Mar del Plata, historian Inés Pérez traces an uneven adoption shaped by expensive sets, children watching at neighbours’ homes, and televisions placed in either living rooms or kitchens.
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