- Presentation
- Sep 18, 2026
- 00:03:28
Research Reels: Bilder einer Gesellschaft (Images of a Society)
"Photographs are challenging sources. They show what the creators intended to capture, and they also preserve what no one intended to record."
Research Scholar Birgit Kolboske presents her illustrated volume, Bilder einer Gesellschaft (“Images of a Society”), published in collaboration with Anne Huffschmid. Drawing on more than 60 years of visual material from the archives of the Max Planck Society, the volume brings together and interprets this material to offer a new perspective on the institution’s history.
Publication
- Huffschmid, A., & Kolboske, B. (2026). Bilder einer Gesellschaft: Erkundungen im fotografischen Gedächtnis der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. doi:10.13109/9783666302602
Copyrights
Produced by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Images:
In order of appearance
- In a moment when supposedly no one was watching at the Ringberg Symposium on the "Internationalität der Forschung", May 1996 | Akz19_2019_Ordner448_8
- The Max Planck Society's Annual Meeting in Munich in June 1973 with Georg Melchers (MPI for Animal Breeding and Animal Nutrition, 2nd from right). | Akz19_2019_Orner373_13
- Physicist and mathematician Eleonore Trefftz (MPI for Physics and Astrophysics) at the meeting of the Scientific Council on January 31, 1985, in Heidelberg | Akz19_Ordner374_Trefftz_Eleonore_3
All of the images come from the Archive of the Max Planck Society, which houses a collection of approximately 100,000 individual photographs curated by Susanne Uebele for the past 30 years.
Music: Blue Dot Sessions - Vessel One (CC BY-NC 4.0)