Photo archive of Adi Blumenthal

Originally coming from the Black Forest region, Adi Blumenthal (1912 – 1999, full name Gustav Adolf Blumenthal), came to the Werdenfelser Land region already in 1928. A descendant of a family of photographers, he started his career as a photographer at the photo studio Beckert in Partenkirchen. In 1933, he opened his own studio in Partenkirchen.

With the aid of magnesia torches, he took photographs of the world’s first night ski slalom in 1934. He was active as an official press photographer at the Olympic Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Berlin in 1936.

In addition, he also worked as a portrait photographer (i.a. Karl Valentin, Roider Jackl, various politicians). Up to around 1980, he documented small-scale and large-scale events and shot portraits of widely known and unknown people in the Werdenfelser Land region.

The archive comprises 4,000 glass negatives, 10,800 35-mm-film rolls and around 1,000 negative strips. It came to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in 2006 as a permanent loan of the market town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The town archive of Garmisch-Partenkirchen holds prints of these negatives.

The cataloguing and digitization of the material are still in their early stages.

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