Elizabeth Edwards, a British researcher into the
relations among photography, history, and anthropology,
used the term of non-collections to define numerous photographs
of unidentified status which can be found in contemporary
museums. They are not collector’s items, such as e.g.,
artistic photography or unique specimens of the first photography
techniques. What she rather means are various items:
prints, slides, photo-mechanic reproductions, postcards, namely
objects once produced on a mass scale, with copies present
in many institutions worldwide, thus being neither unique
nor extraordinary. They present works from a museum
collection, historic pieces of local art, or universally known works
of world art. They exist in a hierarchical relation with other
classes of museum objects, yet they are often pushed to the
margin of curator’s practice and kept as ‘archives’, namely outside
the system of the museum collection. They can sometimes
be found in museum archival sections, in other instances
in libraries, yet it is on more rare occasions that we come
across them in photo departments. However, owing to the research
into archival photographs conducted in the last decade
(the studies of afore-mentioned Elizabeth Edwards and also
Constanza Caraffa as well as the teams cooperating with the latter),
such collections are experiencing a certain revival. Forming
part of this research, the paper focuses on the collections of reproductions
produced at the turn of the 20th century in museums
in Toruń, Poznań, and Szczecin, which were German at the
time; the reproductions later found their way to and continue
being kept in Polish institutions.