LANGHANSARCHIV

Langhansarchiv: History

Langhans House has served almost no other purpose but photography. From 1880 when it was established, the J. F. Langhans Studio operated here, until 1948 when the company was nationalized and the Družstvo fotografia (Photography Co-op) took its place. In the second half of the 1990s, at the initiative of the descendents of Jan Langhans, the house was remodelled, and Langhans Gallery Prague, a not-for-profit arts organization, was founded here. Since 2002 the commercial spaces of the house have been let out to the FotoŠkoda camera shop.

Jan Langhans, who founded the J. F. Langhans studio, was trained in food chemistry, but he became overwhelmingly enchanted with photography. In 1876 he opened his first studio, and over the next thirty years he became one of the leading portrait photographers in the Bohemian Lands. He soon expanded his operations from Vodičkova ulice, Prague, to a number of branches throughout the country.

Among Langhan’s innumerable customers were leading international figures in the arts, science, commerce, and politics, as well as many aristocrats. Some the portraits from his vast archive were included in his ‘Gallery of Eminent People’, which forms a reflection of society at the time. The Ateliér Langhans achieved world renown, both in the days when the Bohemian Lands were part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and later when they were part of the Czechoslovak Republic.

After the First World War, when the archive comprised more than a million negatives, Langhans passed on the company to his daughter, Marie, and her husband, Viktor Meisner. After the Second World War, the Langhans photo studio was taken over by Viktor Meisner, Langhans’s grandson. In 1948, shortly after the Communists took power, the studio was nationalized. The archive, which had by then grown to comprise two and half million negatives, was taken away to a dump on the outskirts of Prague, and destroyed. A document of national value was turned into tonnes of broken glass. All that seemed to remain of the seventy-year history of the Langhans studio was two boxes of memorabilia.

In 1991 the house was returned to the family under new legislation on restitution. While preparing the renovation and remodelling of the house in September 1998 workers came upon on a locked cupboard. When they opened it they found three-hundred boxes of glass negatives. Hidden in the cellar unnoticed for more than fifty years, this treasure had escaped the Communist attempts of the 1950s to rewrite the past. It was part of the unique ‘Gallery of Eminent People’, part of the cultural heritage of the country, which was thought to have been destroyed in 1948.

It includes negatives of portraits of the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1919), the young opera singer Emmy Destinn (1895), who later became a star of the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and portraits of the most important actors of the National Theatre, Prague, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as Czechoslovak premiers, mayors, businessmen, and writers. There are also portraits of many foreigners who were either visiting Bohemia or lived here (including the poet and diplomat Paul Claudel, Emperor Charles I of Austria-Hungary, and Louis Philippe Robert d’Orleans, pretender to the French throne). These photographs are a reminder that the Bohemian Lands were indeed an important part of Europe.

A representative selection of one hundred negatives was carried out by the photographer Ivan Lutterer (1954–2001). The contact prints that were made from them were first exhibited in the Rudolfinum, Prague, in spring 2000. The effect was as if the energetic spirit of Jan Langhans had come back to life, and in June of that year another 200 boxes of negatives were found in another cellar, and they are also part of the ‘Gallery of Eminent People’.

The 9,000 glass negatives of the ‘Gallery of Eminent People’ were entrusted to the Langhans Prague Foundation. In this way the discovered archive will be preserved intact for future generations.