An exhibition presenting two hundred years of photographic history, The World Around Us, recently opened at the National Collection of Photography in Copenhagen. It will in all likelihood be one of the museum’s last. As part of the Danish government’s savings plan, The Royal Danish Library, which houses the collection, must cut a staggering DKK 62.5 million (EUR 8.4 million) – equivalent to 9 per cent of the library’s annual budget.
The Royal Danish Library has collected photographs of all kinds, artistic as well as documentary, ever since the Collection of Maps, Prints, and Photographs was established in 1902. It was the photo historian Bjørn Ochsner who, in the early 1950s, systematically shaped the foundations of what is now known as the National Collection of Photography. The collection comprises more than fifty thousand photographic works as well as a substantial picture archive of over eighteen million physical images.
Until now, the institution has conducted research, engaged in public dissemination, and arranged exhibitions and talks with Danish and international artists. But the Royal Danish Library is now tightening its belt – and the noose: all acquisitions of new photographs have been halted, and the collection’s curator responsible for special exhibitions is being made redundant. That leaves a single employee to handle all of the above tasks within this colossal collection.
Although the government’s savings plan claims to focus on “administrative savings,” it is clear that the knife is also cutting into research and scholarly fields. In the so-called “work programme” launched this August, the cuts were presented side by side with new priorities, including a “strengthening of Defence and security, which will mean more employees within these areas.”
News of the drastic cutbacks to the National Collection of Photography arrived in mid-October. Adding grave insult to injury – rather like pouring nitric acid into an open wound – a few weeks later the EU Council, currently headed by Denmark, issued a joint declaration “on the necessity of culture and media as a safeguard for our European democracies,” endorsed by ministers of culture from across the EU plus Norway and the United Kingdom.
Written in English and available in full on the Danish Ministry of Culture’s website, the grandiose declaration states: “Our cultural heritage, tangible, intangible and digital, acts as a living memory, connecting us to our past and with each other.” And that “the arts provide a powerful form of free expression, through which we can reflect upon, challenge, and reaffirm the democratic values we stand for.”
It’s enough to make you rub your eyes and shed a tear when, with great pathos, the ministers speak of European culture and art as spiritually ennobling in the face of external threats. On the use of artificial intelligence, they write: “It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between authentic and AI-generated or manipulated material online […]. Digitally manipulated images and videos can create fundamental doubts about what is a true representation of reality and what is not.”
So: looking at the world through photographs and through a meta-gaze at photography’s nature and function, especially in times of war, sits at the very top of the Danish Ministry of Culture’s agenda. The same agenda has, amusingly enough, also been the curatorial line of the National Collection of Photography’s special exhibitions since 2021, when Charlotte Præstegaard Schwartz took up the post as curator.
Exhibitions such as: Ukrainian Diary – Photography by Boris Mikhailov from 1966 to Today (2024–2025); Two Rooms (2023) featuring contemporary artists Per Bak Jensen and Ismar Čirkinagić, who explored the nature of war as both an inner and an outer state; and the major exhibition presenting the photojournalist, war photographer, and artist Lee Miller (2022–2023), showed how photography is indeed documentary, yet can also be poetic and ambiguous. In other words, the National Collection of Photography has, several years before Engel-Schmidt himself suddenly found the matter urgent, worked to deepen our understanding of photography in times of crisis. Under Præstegaard Schwartz, the institution has held a remarkably strong position as an international hub for those interested in photography across countries and cultures.
The minister’s flowery rhetoric becomes an embarrassing tripwire when, at the same time, his policy is starving Denmark’s only institution that works systematically to understand the digital challenges of our present moment from historical, contemporary, photographic, ontological, and phenomenological perspectives. Or, to put it plainly: the techniques of digital manipulation that Engel-Schmidt points out as a threat to culture and democracy, a threat to which the government now wants to respond by allocating more public funds, were born out of the photographic medium itself.
From this point on, there will be no major institutions in Denmark with the resources required to properly care for this specific genre of art. The World Around Us will presumably be the museum’s final take on an exhibition that connects photography’s cultural heritage to the very latest photographic modes of expression, forging links and furthering understanding between generations across geographic and technological boundaries. All things considered, I cannot imagine a more fitting exhibition title.
Translated from Danish.
