Schostal Photo Agency (Agentur Schostal) was a press photo agency, named after its owner, Robert F. Schostal.
Contents
History
Schostal Photo Agency (Agentur Schostal) was founded in 1929 with the aim of producing and distributing photographs both locally and globally. With more than one million photos covering a wide variety of subjects it was one of the great agencies of the 1920s and 1930s. The headquarters were in Wieden, the 4th district of Vienna in the former office of Wiener Photo-Kurier. Schostal had representatives and offices in major European cities Paris, Milan, Berlin and Stockholm.
The main customers were print media, including magazines such as "Die Dame", "Die Woche" and "Uhu" in Austria, "Moderne Welt", "Die Bühne", "Wiener Salonblatt" and "Wiener Magazin" to which Schostal supplied images relating to culture, fashion and glamor. From 1929 it was the Austrian representative of the Keystone Press Agency (London, New York).
In June 1938 Nazi troops invaded Austria. The Schostal agency was taken over by an Aryan director Friedrich Gondosch, and rebranded with the stamp "Wien Bild" followed by the banner P.P.P. Photos für Presse und Propaganda ('PPP photos for press and propaganda'). It represented renowned photographers such as Kitty Hoffmann, Manassé, Dr. Paul Wolff, Georges Sand, Willem van de Poll, Bert Longworth, Germaine Krull, Yva, Madame d'Ora and Lotte Jacobi. Especially for the latter Jewish photographers, Schostal was one of the few business to circumvent the Nazi Reich Chamber of Culture (nationalsozialistischenReichskulturkammer) ban on their employment.
Closure
After the war, in 1948, the agency closed and for an unknown reason some of the photos were hidden in a basement.
Rediscovery
In 1992, an unknown Austrian art dealer discovered approximately 130,000 well preserved photographs bearing the Schostal Agency stamp, more than 40 years after the agency went out of business in 1948. Parts of the collection that were discovered in 1992 were sold or auctioned off to various institutions. The German Historical Museum bought 40,000 photos in 1995, The Hamburg Museum of Arts and Crafts bought 350 fashion photographs, and some went to the National Library of Vienna.
A bulk of the photographs are owned by the Austrian publisher Christian Brandstätter, the founder of IMAGNO Brandstätter Institute, a leading historical picture agency in Austria that currently has 300,000 Schostal photographs in their holdings. It is unknown how this company acquired the majority of photographs as the number in the collection surpasses the 130,000 prints discovered in 1992.
A portion of this collection, 5,066 gelatin silver prints, 58 information sheets, and 34 photograph envelopes made between 1927 and 1945, was anonymously donated to the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in 2008.
Links
Agentur Schostal entry at the Deutschen Historischen Museum (German).