In its first ten years of life the Foundation photo library coincided with the collection Federico Zeri donated to Bologna University in 1998.
The Zeri Collection (Fondo Zeri) was perfectly ordered, compact and finished – a rarity among photo archives of its kind. It stemmed from Zeri’s painstaking classification and reorganization over a large part of his career.
In 2003 there began a cataloguing project designed to enhance the value and safeguard this extraordinary material. The project combines historical and critical research, description in cataloguing terms and employment of new technology.
The ensuing online database has enabled this archive to be consulted via the Web and has brought the bequest and the Foundation’s activities to world attention, extending well beyond the select art historian user.
Since 2008 scholars, photographers, collectors and antiquarians have donated their own photograph collections to the Foundation archive.
Though inferior in number and quality to Zeri’s, such materials are a welcome addition to documentation and provide some major new insights for those studying the connections between history of art and photography. The photographs included in different collections communicate through the link to entries that describe the same works of art as represented in the pictures.
The new additions to the Foundation are the focus of a project, Esplora i fondi (Explore the collections), which has lead to publication of an online databank under the same name, connected to the photo archive catalogue. This enables the contents of the whole existing photo archive to be explored, including cataloguing details on individual works.
With its present holding of 450,000 photos, the Federico Zeri Foundation aims to become something more than a repository for photo collections from people connected with history of art.
Current cataloguing campaigns involve themes that run throughout the various collections.
The project Fakes in the Zeri Foundation Photographic Collections entailed the cataloguing of all photos of fakes and falsifications contained in four different archives (Zeri, Fahy, Albrighi, Vertova).