Fratelli Alinari Archives merged in the year 2007 with the Il Sole 24 Ore and created a new company called Alinari 24 ORE. 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; it was founded in Florence in 1852.
In 1985 the Fratelli Alinari Museum of the History of Photography, with the Library of the History of Photography, joined the original “historical” institutions, i.e., the Archives, the Art Printworks, the Publishing House and the Photographic Collection, and in 1996 their ranks were swelled by the addition of the Photographic Restoration Laboratory, set up in collaboration with the Opificio delle Pietre Dure.
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 and glass plate negatives to film and slides), and which is responsible for the management of an ongoing program of exhibitions and publishing.
Since 2007, two Museums of Multimedia and History of Photography have been open to the public in Florence (the renovated National Museum of Photography-MNAF: http://www.mnaf.it) and Trieste (Alinari Image Museum-AIM).
Printing techniques
In the Fratelli Alinari Archives specialized workers still use the old nineteenth-century artisan techniques in printing from the historical glass plate negatives. The prints, also tinted in sepia and in various monochromes (color before the invention of color), are contact printed using bromographs, creating faithful copies on high quality photographic paper, manually and one by one.
The Photographic Library
The Alinari Photographic Library is one of the most important centers in the world for iconographic and photographic documentation. It is used by an international public of scholars, students and professional figures in the various disciplines.
Alinari On-line and the Restoration Laboratory
In order to make the images available to a greater number of people, 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 450,000 Alinari images on-line at http://edu.alinari.it and http://business.alinari.it.
Collaboration with Leica microsystems
Alinari and Leica set up a cooperative project in the field of photographic analysis for conservation and restoration purposes based on the Leica M205C microscope and the Bilz stabilized air-pressure controlled table.
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, and today MultiMatch, MILE, Eurogene, Fotomemoria, CITER and TRIPOD.
The Archive is today very active in Italy and Europe in several research, education research and marketing validation projects, providing valuable contributions mainly in the following domains: watermarking, digital rights management, content providing, 3D applications, image enhancement, intelligent content retrieval, Web semantics and ontologies, distance learning, preservation and image restoration, validation, testing, exploitation and multimedia content supply.