Ahead of the digitisation process of Hermann Marbe’s vast archive, this issue of The Slow Camera Exchange is dedicated to image archives. An archive is not just a repository of materials from the past, it is also a place with a beating heart where present and past, life and death, fact and imagination come together.
In an image archive, we feel the connection with the past. Time and again, we look through the eyes of the photographer and are in a different time and place. A photo archive is a time travel through the imagination of the photographer.
Especially for this issue of The Slow Camera Exchange, Adwin de Kluyver, writer of creative non-fiction and historian, chose a number of angles in which he shows how archive material can inspire new stories, new insights and new works of art.
In his work, the Dutch writer focuses on the thin line between fact and fiction. In the essay ‘Three Stories’, he shows what assumptions the discovery of historical material can generate, and questions whether truth is always