Photographic Materials Production in Germany

When looking at the Atlas of Economic Complexity of Germany, one thing immediately stood out to me. I’ve grown up with a father who’s been a photographer and cinematographer his whole life, and it’s his true passion in life. I watched him photograph us as kids, and have grown up to watch him make it his trade by day, so once I saw that Germany is an exporter of photographic goods, it stood out to me!

German Photo Pape from the 1930s. (https://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/photo_industry_hubs/7.html)

I haven’t ever thought of Germany as a country which produces and exports photographic film, and other materials, but it is a decently big exporter. The reason it stood out specifically is because of the Export Growth Dynamics page, featuring photographic and cinematographic goods, surprisingly, as the most complex group of products that it exports!

Germany Export Growth Dynamics (2021, https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/countries/61/growth-dynamics)

Also surprisingly, Germany has a rich history of both producing and exporting these goods, going back all the way to the 1800’s. The US imported massive amounts of photographic paper back in the 1800’s from both Germany and France, providing much of what was used in the United States during that time period — specifically many photographic goods stores, one of which being the one below. Germany and France alone exported seven and a half million sheets of photographic paper in 1963, after social commentator and photography enthusiast Oliver Wendell Holmes visited this photographic emporium as he was interested in how big the photography business was getting.

View of the E. and H. T. Anthony Brothers’ Shop on Broadway in John C. Gobright, The Union Sketch-Book . . . (New York: Pudney and Russell, 1860). University of Wisconsin, Madison; digitized by Google Books

Germany also produces camera lenses and other gear of which still is exported to this day, and still accounts for a chunk of their exports! Even though the industry started and become particularly prominent during the 1800s, it is impressive that it still exists today in the form that it does.

I’m super, super excited to take photographs when in Germany, and I’ll of course have my camera on me, almost always, you’ll see a bunch of those!

Works Cited:

Katherine Mintie, “Material Matters: The Transatlantic Trade in Photographic Materials during the Nineteenth Century,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 6, no. 2 (Fall 2020), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.10597.