The Royal and General Archive of Navarra makes available to all citizens more than 12,000 old photographs reflecting a hundred-year journey of history of the Foral Community, between 1860 and 1960.
For this, the new website www.fototecanavarra.es which has been conceived as a platform on which collects and organizes all the photographic heritage of Navarra preserved in the institution. Through it it is possible to access the digitized old photographs from a total of 21 funds.
More than half of the free access photographs they come from five institutional funds. Of all of them, the 792 photographs of the Commission for Historical and Artistic Monuments of Navarra, dated between 1861 and 1935, stand out, and due to their age they constitute an x-ray of the architectural and artistic heritage at the time prior to the restoration campaigns undertaken during the 20th century, the provincial government has reported.
It also gathers an important Graphic testimony of the traditional Navarrese society, as reflected in the series of photographs of the Regional Costume of 1924 or of the mountain farmhouses of 1912. On the other hand, the collection of the Provincial and Provincial Council of Navarre gathers the photographs taken in the follow-up of the public works promoted by the Direction of Roads in numerous localities, those of the protocol acts of the Corporación Foral, those of the Ibero-American Exposition in Seville in 1929 or the voluminous series of 3,117 photographs by the Barcelona studio Arxiu Mas taken between 1916 and 1934 on the artistic heritage of Navarre.
The second set in importance is made up of sixteen personal and family funds. The most important are those that include the activity of professional photographers such as José Galle and amateur photographers such as Julio Altadill, Carlos Amat, José Belzunce, José Martínez, Alberto Oficialdegui, José Velasco, Fidel Astiz, Eugeniusz Frankowski, Juan Ciganda and Ángel Martínez.
Regarding the digitized photographs Of these funds, in the case of Foto Galle, the main establishment of Navarre photojournalism, the oldest photographs on glass plate and nitrate support have been selected. For his part, Julio Altadill, pioneer of amateur photographers from Navarre, has managed to gather most of his production, a total of 1,364 images.
Finally, the set of personal and family funds such as those of Mariano Ansó, Victorino Aoiz and del Frago, Arturo Campión, Generoso Huarte and the Iráizoz Astiz family, who offer complementary readings, especially through study photographs taken in professional establishments installed in Navarra.
All these personal and family funds they are kept in the Royal and General Archive of Navarra at the express wish of their owners, who in most cases have donated them. The Archive guarantees the permanent custody and conservation of the photographs and makes them available to those interested after their restoration and digitization. Those owners of old photographic collections who are willing to deliver goods of this type to the institution can contact the technical staff via email at [email protected].
TECHNICAL WORKS
The General Directorate of Culture-Príncipe de Viana Institution has used more than ten years in these recovery tasks and cataloging of Navarre’s photographic heritage. Currently, the Royal and General Archive of Navarra is developing the Navarra Photo Library program, which brings together specialists in the field of restoration, digitization, history and archiving for the proper treatment of these unique historical objects.
At this time, the technical works on the 21 mentioned funds have been completed, already published on the Internet, but the tasks continue with 33 other funds under custody. Specifically, the collections Aerial Photography and Terrestrial, and Marqués de Santa María del Villar, are in the process of being cataloged, and new phases of work relating to the Marquesses of Real Defense and Jesús María Lacasia photographic collections will soon begin. As these cataloging works are completed, the images uploaded to the Internet will be updated.
OPEN AND ACCESSIBLE COLLECTION
So far, these photographs they could only be consulted in person through the computer equipment of the Royal and General Archive of Navarra. The novelty that has occurred now is that thanks to their publication on the Internet they are made available to all citizens.
Your query can be made through the new Fototeca de Navarra website (www.fototecanavarra.es), which organizes the photographs by collections, or directly through the Open File web search engine www.archivoabierto.navarra.es, which allows direct consultation of the descriptions as well as the viewing of all the images, with the aim of bringing the documentary collections closer to all concerned.
With this new dump, the Executive has indicated, the Open File search engine is consolidated as the first available resource online for the consultation of primary sources from the Navarre archives. It brings together more than 266,000 descriptive records from the Royal and General Archive of Navarra and the Contemporary Archive of Navarra, dated between the 13th and 21st centuries, “a commitment by the Government of Navarra to bring historical documentary sources closer to the Internet”.
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