Congratulations to Untited Archives owner and PAN friend Frank Nikolaus Golomb who has announced he now owns the complete photo archive of Berlin-based Mauritius Verlag – a world history archive covering 1920-1945.
• PAN note: Frank started scanning another massive archive last year – the German Handelsblatt Publishing House
• Archive content: The archive of Mauritius Verlag, which produced photo reports in the 1920s and 1930s during the era of illustrated magazines and supplied them to papers such as Ullstein’s Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, comprises today around 50,000 negatives. The archive was privately owned by Hans Jörg Zwez until March 2021. In 1935 the original owner and founder Ernest Mayer left Germany and founded Black Star in New York.
Frank at United told PAN: “Some of the digitised material is on the market, but by using various pseudonyms, the recognizability and findability of this unique collection has been diluted and the brand profile weakened. For example, the photographs can be found under the names Vyntage Visuals, under VisualEyze, under Vyntage Visuals for Kensington, and so on.
Frank wants to start tidying up some of the Mauritius Images brand dilution over the years – here’s how:
First I would like to work with the collection and its change of contents over the years. It is very interesting to see the themes moving/changing in this decade of national socialism and later war, later end of the war, a starting Federal Republic. And there must have been a break when Meyer left to New York in 35 and sold the company to the Father of Hans Jörg Zwez.
Second I would like to see correct rights statement in Googles index, what is not given with pseudonyns.
Third, these pseudonyms are not agreed with us as the rightsholders of the digital files and are against written words in the basic contract and I want to change the copyright information for all the images in Shutterstock, Alamy, Superstock etc into United Archives/Mauritius
