The Münchner Stadtmuseum notes that this article discusses visual and textual sources that depict discriminatory power dynamics. The images and texts represent contemporary perspectives from which we distance ourselves. At the same time, we feel a responsibility to provide the interested public with access to these sources in order to facilitate a critical engagement with the historical material.
"Thanks to luck and fine weather, the pictures turned out very well, and I received so many commissions from different people that I could organize to have paper, cardstock, and chemicals delivered by the train driver from Rosario, and could have worked day and night." [1]
Christian Adolf David Klöpfer
Hamburg, 1869: at the age of 28, Christian Adolf David Klöpfer decided to make good on his “"ong-cherished desire to travel the world". His "adventure" began on board the sailing ship Juno. There, he and three fellow travelers “followed their fancy” and set off on a "62-day journey" to Montevideo, Uruguay in South America on March 6.[2] This is how he described it in his diary, which was published in 2008 under the title Die Abenteuer meines Lebens. Das Tagebuch eines Auswanderers (The Adventures of My Life: Diary of an Émigré).
Together with this written record, Klöpfer documented his experience in photographs: specifically in two photo albums he assembled himself. Together, this combination of text and image offers a powerful testimony to his life between 1869 and 1900, when he traveled the world many times over and spent extended periods in Bolivia and Argentina. There, he was able to engage in a great variety of professions thanks to his vast network among Argentina’s European community, which was already well-established in the nineteenth century and included many Germans. He worked as a partner in a company, a bookkeeper, a store manager of a pulperia (a general store also serving alcohol and colonial goods), installing telegraph poles—and most importantly, as a photographer.
Klöpfer was thus able to not only support himself financially across decades, but even save “a small fortune” with which he could purchase grounds and a house for his family in Hamburg. This was where he lived until his death at the age of 85.[3]
Who was Christian Adolf David Klöpfer: a photographer, an adventurer, or a businessman? Why are his travel diaries and photo albums part of Münchner Stadtmuseum’s Photography Collection today? Were his photos intended for his own use or did they also circulate in the retail photography market, as did works by many of his contemporaries who were professional photographers? Were all the photographs taken by Klöpfer himself, or were some by others?
Adolf Klöpfer in the Photography Collection at Münchner Stadtmuseum
This set of works was added to the collection in 2024 after his family contacted the museum about the diverse materials they held. The current research being conducted constitutes the first scholarly engagement with Klöpfer’s photo albums.
In the course of this research, the first scholarly engagement with Adolf Klöpfer’s photo albums is now taking place.“
The Photography Collection holds two photo albums, three gelatin silver prints (gelatin copying paper and matte collodion paper) on cardstock, and thirty albumen prints, also on cardstock. These appear to be unbound album pages. Moreover, there are copies of family documents including Klöpfer’s handwritten notes on the family’s history (illustrated by photographs), biographical documents, a range of letters, as well as a typewritten copy and an abridged published version of his original diary.
The two photo albums have different dimensions and contents. The slightly smaller first album (FM-2024/99.1) is 24.5 × 36 × 4 cm and contains images from Klöpfer’s first trips to and stays in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, the United States, Japan, China, the Philippines, and Egypt between 1869 and 1873. It has a brown leather cover with the title Album in gold lettering, with 74 pages and 131 albumen prints.
The second album (FM-2024/99.2) has a more modest appearance, with a clothbound thick cardstock cover and reinforced leather corners and spine, measuring 28.4 × 37.5 × 5 cm. It continues Klöpfer’s visual journey and contains 112 albumen prints from 1874 to 1890 across 58 pages. The hand-colored photographs form a unique feature of the albums, showing Klöpfer’s family in Bützow, Germany (where his wife Sophie was from) as well as portraits and views taken in Argentina, the United States, and the Philippines. The prints are framed by red double lines hand-drawn on the album pages, and are titled by hand, with many of them signed "A. Klöpfer". Both albums feature a handwritten title page and are arranged chronologically, with rare exceptions.
The hand-colored second album mostly contains photographs taken by Klöpfer showing views as well as portraits of fellow travelers, family members, and acquaintances while traveling or in front of their estancias (Argentinian family ranches). The first album contains more generic views of cities and places as well as classic depictions of Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Egypt. Klöpfer has not signed the studio portraits of members of the indigenous peoples and many of the travel photographs, and some of their dates do not correspond to his diary entries. This offers the first indication that Klöpfer put together photographs he had purchased with his own images in the album. Digital image searches and research in a range of online archives makes it possible to attribute some of the images to the following photographers and photography studios: Paul-Emile Miot (1827–1900), Ricardo Villalba (active as a photographer in Peru and Bolivia circa 1875), Eugenio Maunoury (1830–1896), and the Hermanos Courret (brothers Eugène Courret 1839–1920 and Aquiles Courret 1830–?).
Notably, many of the images in the second album feature staged portraits of Klöpfer where he could not have taken the actual photograph but most likely was "responsible for the staging".[4]
Even though the exact dates when the albums were assembled cannot be determined, one may assume they were created following Klöpfer’s return from Argentina in 1900, as indicated by his original diary, where Klöpfer pasted three photographs of himself taken in 1865, 1871, and 1912 onto the first page.
Over the course of this research, the question arose as to whether Klöpfer hand-colored the images in the second album alone or whether his wife and/or daughter worked on this. This invites the question of whether the photo album was jointly authored. A detailed contextualization of this can be found in the essay Ambivalent Authorship. Amateurism and Professionalism in Adolf Klöpfer’s Photography.
The Photo Album: A Collection within a Collection
Despite their great cultural and historical relevance, photo albums often go neglected in the history of photography and museum archives. In part, their "hybrid, multimedia nature" makes exhibition and interpretation more difficult, as does the lack of adequate methodological approaches to "constellative vision" and the difficulty posed by their seemingly arbitrary and often highly personal curation.[5] The example of Adolf Klöpfer’s photo albums makes visible the significance of such collections as material archives. In his albums, Klöpfer brings together his own photographs with images he purchased showing typological and generic pictures taken in South America and Egypt. They epitomize a plural authorship and an intertwining of personal, social, and global histories. Granted, Klöpfer’s albums are not narrated in the oral tradition surrounding photo albums as specified by Bernd Stiegler and Kathrin Yacavone, but his written diaries play a central role in reading his visual material. The direct link between his visual and textual narrative opens up an illuminating juxtaposition of his itineraries and experiences. In this, the albums function as hybrid memory objects at the intersection of normative photographic formats, personal staging, and public communication. This dual anchoring allows them to function as vital sources for researching memory, identity, and visual culture in the context of exhibition and archival practices.
Klöpfer’s Original Diaries: Witnesses to a Photo-Taking World Traveler
Adolf Klöpfer left two extensive diaries which vividly document his life and activities across Europe and South America. The first diary, spanning the years 1869 to 1900, is on permanent loan to the BallinStadt Emigration Museum in Hamburg. It was published in 2008 after being transcribed and professionally reviewed under the title Christian Adolf David Klöpfer.Die Abenteuer meines Lebens. Das Tagebuch eines Auswanderers (The Adventure of My Life: Diary of an Émigré).
His second and less well-known diary covers the period following 1900, after Klöpfer returned to Germany, which includes handwritten notes and bound pages with colored gelatin prints. It remains in the possession of the Klöpfer family, but was temporarily loaned to the Photography Collection at Münchner Stadtmuseum, allowing it to be closely examined and partially digitized. It contains instructions for working with chemicals in photographic processes, demonstrating that Klöpfer not only took photographs but was also in command of technological image-making processes typical of his day, carrying these out himself.
Both diaries have bound cardstock sheets with smaller gelatin prints (approx. 6 × 9 cm) of the same motifs depicted in the albumen prints in the photo albums. In part, they also contain images that are not present in the albums. The high quality of these prints suggests Klöpfer sent his glass plates back to Germany in order to have them copied and reproduced. Yet more in-depth research shows that his diaries also contain images taken by Eugenio Maunoury, the Hermanos Courret, as well as unknown photographers. This rules out a direct exposure of glass plates given that the original negatives would have remained in their respective photo studios.[6] Instead, it is possible that Klöpfer also reproduced his own albumen prints rather than the glass plates using exposure processes, perhaps leaving the glass plates behind in Argentina. To date, there is no evidence of Klöpfer’s photographs being held by collections in South America.
Klöpfer’s Photography Equipment and Knowledge
The final pages of the diary remaining in the possession of the Klöpfer family include Klöpfer’s "Various Recipes". These include instructions for making soap in wartime, etching iron, and tanning hides—as well as for photographic processes.[7] For instance, he records the chemical formulas for coating glass plates, gold embellishments, printing-out processes using albumen paper, and development processes, as well as paint mixtures for coloring prints. Where and how Klöpfer learned about photography remains unrecorded. There were rare instances of daguerreotype instruction being given in Germany from 1843, and from 1854, magazines were published offering training courses in photography.[8]
"Frozen instants" such as the views he took from a train while in the United States in the 1890s evidence Klöpfer’s later use of dry plates.[9] The dry plate process was first developed in the 1870s using a gelatin emulsion preapplied to glass plates. Such plates enabled shorter exposure times and were easier both to store and transport, in contrast to the collodion plates, which needed to be coated, exposed, and printed out while wet.
One cannot conclusively determine which cameras Klöpfer used.[10] His diary entries suggest he had extensive photography equipment. The only photography paraphernalia held and exhibited at BallinStadt Emigration Museum in Hamburg is a travel plate camera with a quick release and two holders for glass plates. Such a travel camera formed part of “every photographer’s standard equipment”. Easy to store, it allowed a variety of shots by adjusting the front and focusing screens. Photographic equipment such as cameras, lenses, chemicals, papers, albums, and frames was widely available in Germany from 1862.[11]
Photography reached the coast of Uruguay and Argentina in 1840, and just three years later, photographic services were being advertised in magazines. Between 1852 and 1860, the number of registered photographers in Buenos Aires rose from ten to sixty.[12] This shows that there was not a dearth of photographic equipment in the region—as is evident from Klöpfer’s diary. He was easily able to acquire “paper, chemicals, and cardstock” from Rosario de Santa Fé in 1869.[13]
Placement within the Collection
There is a long tradition of examining the medium of the photo album at Münchner Stadtmuseum. Back in 1975, Ellen Maas looked at the many forms that albums took in the nineteenth century in the exhibition Das Fotoalbum 1858–1918.[14] The focus there was on a private collection of albums made to display cartes de visite, rather than on work by well-known photographers.[15]
Another key stage was the 1993 exhibition Knipser. Die Bildgeschichte der privaten Fotografie in Deutschland und Österreich von 1880 bis 1980 (Shutterbugs: The Visual History of Personal Photography in Germany and Austria between 1880 and 1980), curated by Timm Starl and Manfred Wegner. It examined private photo albums assembled by amateur photographers (or shutterbugs) through the lens of their aesthetic and social functions, highlighting the photo album as a compositional work conveying a visual language that made visible the process not merely of photographing, but also of collecting, organization, and labelling.[16]
Over the course of his many years as department director, Ulrich Pohlmann increasingly focused the collection on historic travel photography. In this, he initially looked most closely at professional figures such as Samuel Bourne, whose photographs taken in India were published in Samuel Bourne – sieben Jahre Indien. Photographien und Reiseberichte 1863–1870 (Samuel Bourne: Seven Years in India. Photographs and Travel Reports 1863–1870; 2001). Together with the two previously published exhibition catalogues Felice Beato in Japan. Photographien zum Ende der Feudalzeit 1863–1873 (Photographs of the End of the Feudal Era; 1991) and Giorgio Sommer in Italien. Fotografien 1857–1888 (Giorgio Sommer in Italy: Photographs; 1992), they formed a trilogy on travel photography as a photographic genre—always with the goal of critically examining the relationship between travel, the photographer’s gaze, and larger colonial contexts.
It is the mix of diary and photo album that makes the Adolf Klöpfer collection so unique in the Photography Collection. Whereas other estates—for instance those of Regina Relang and Oskar Messter—chiefly contain ephemera such as notes, technical sketches, and correspondence alongside photographs, Klöpfer’s work offers an unusual link between a personal travel journey, technical documentation, and photographic archive. Thus the Adolf Klöpfer bequest offers a unique addition to the 250+ travel and souvenir albums from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast to the other holdings, most of which are anonymous or incomplete, Klöpfer’s materials offer an unusual density of both subjective experience and photographic achievement of a middle-class European world traveler of the nineteenth century.
The Adolf Klöpfer holdings are listed in the museum data base under the inventory numbers FM-2024/99.1, FM-2024/99.2, and FM-2024/99.3. Some items may be viewed at Sammlung Online.
Endnotes
[1] Adolf Klöpfer, Die Abenteuer meines Lebens: Das Tagebuch eines Auswanderers (Hamburg: Ellert & Richter Verlag, 2008), 35–36.
[2] Ibid., 25–27.
[3] Klöpfer, Die Abenteuer meines Lebens, 230.
[4] Kathrin Yacavone, "Intermediale Inszenierungsformen: Victor Hugo und das 'Album Allix'", Fotogeschichte, no. 161 (2021): 15.
[5] Bernd Stiegler and Kathrin Yacavone, eds., Editorial, Fotogeschichte Norm und Form: Fotoalben im 19. Jahrhundert, no. 161 (2021): 3–4.
[6] The commercially operating photo studios did not sell the original glass sheets, which were unique, rather reproductions directly copied from the sheets.
[7] Adolf Klöpfer: "Technische Rezepturen", Tagebuch von Adolf Kloepfer, original diary.
[8] Ludwig Hoerner, Das Photographische Gewerbe in Deutschland 1839–1914 (Düsseldorf: GFW-Verlag, 1989), 93–95.
[9] Adolf Klöpfer, caption FM-2024/99.2.99, "Ansichten zu meinem Tagebuche".
[10] Prior to riding out into the Atacama Desert on December 26, 1871, he borrowed a mule from a dealer between Bolivia and Chile in exchange for photographs he had taken as well as a stereo camera, "which his daughter found very interesting". Klöpfer, Die Abenteuer meines Lebens, 92.
[11] Hoerner, Das Photographische Gewerbe in Deutschlaund 1839–1914, 45–46.
[12] Alicia D’Amico, "Stichworte zur Geschichte der Fotografie in Argentinien", Fotografie Lateinamerika von 1860 bis heute, ed. Erika Billeter (Bern: Benteli, 1981), 25–26.
[13] Klöpfer, Die Abenteuer meines Lebens, 36.
[14] See Ellen Maas, ed., Das Fotoalbum 1858–1918, Eine Ausstellung des Münchner Stadtmuseums, Munich, 1975.
[15] These small portrait photographs had been highly popular since the 1860s, with millions produced, collected, and exchanged in an early expression of visual mass-media culture.
[16] See Timm Starl and Manfred Wegner: Knipser. Die Bildgeschichte der privaten Fotografie in Deutschland und Österreich 1880–1980, exhibition catalogue (München/Wien 1993)
About the author
Esra Klein is a curator with a background in photojournalism and documentary photography and a master’s degree in Curatorial Studies. She is particularly interested in a decentralization of the photographic canon. In 2025–2026, she is a Curatorial Fellow at the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Foundation, working in various international photography collections.
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