Hidden Clues: Franz von Kobell’s Photographic Experiments of 1837

Abstract

The Munich chemist and mineralogist Franz von Kobell (1803–1882) experimented successfully with the salt print method two years before the official birth of photography in 1839. The fourteen negatives of his preserved in the collections of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, among them seven images of that city’s famous Frauenkirche, were presented to the public in 2024 for the first time in a separate publication in the context of Kobell’s other early experimentation with photographic reproduction and the works of his colleague Carl August Steinheil (1801–1870). This paper asks in depth why the early dating of those works has only just now been revealed. It also exposes the complexity of any curatorial research that is concerned not just with reliable dating but also with the controversial history of how works are received and handed down, and how some of the hurdles they have to overcome are a consequence of institutional structures.

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