14,000 Slides of Latin American Churches
Alumnus Donates Photo Archive to Art History Institute of Freie Universität
№ 306/2008 from Oct 14, 2008
The Nosso Senhor do Carmo Church is in eastern Brazil in Olinda in the province of Pernambuco.
Image Credit: Detlef M. Noack Photo Archive, Freie Universität Berlin bildarchiv-noack.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/
Mural in the vestry of Santiago de Callapa in the Bolivian capital, La Paz.
Image Credit: Detlef M. Noack Photo Archive, Freie Universität Berlin bildarchiv-noack.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/
Professor Dr. Detlef M. Noack, a 1956 alumnus of Freie Universität Berlin, donated his archive consisting of photos of Ibero-American churches from the 16th to the 19th centuries, to the Art History Institute of Freie Universität Berlin. The 14,000 slides are digitized and are available online.
The 82-year-old art historian completed his Ph.D. in color photography in 1956. He spent over three decades traveling around Latin America, and between 1964 and 1998 he systematically documented religious buildings. Noack is one of the first German researchers who departed from Eurocentrism in art history and concentrated his studies on Latin America. Experts hold the extensive photo documentation in high regard not only because of the high quality of the color photography, but also because Noack's slides are the last photographs taken of a number of the buildings and thus have great historical significance. Some of the churches have been damaged by environmental influences in recent decades. In others, the interiors have been changed by modernizations made to the church buildings.
The digitization project is being sponsored by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.
Additional information may be obtained from:
Dr. Margit Kern, Art History Institute, Freie Universität Berlin, Telephone: +49 (0)30 838 53806,
Email: mkern@zedat.fu-berlin.de