Abstract

Nineteenth-century industry and the trades used photography as a tool for a wide range of purposes. In addition to self-promotion and documentation, it also facilitated the flow of information and targeted product advertising. The photographs created in this wider context are now kept in museums and image archives. The oldest commercial archive in Germany, the voluminous Historisches Archiv Krupp, counts among its treasures a special, bound inventory book containing photographs of the art castings produced at its Sayner Hütte foundry. The article analyses these photographs in respect of the different meanings ascribed to them and the different uses to which they were put, whether in the inventory book itself, as an aid to production or as a source for the history of the company and of industrial history generally.

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