Welcome to the Forum Internationale Photographie

The Forum Internationale Photographie ownes the renowned photographer Robert Häusser's oeuvre and holdings from the historical collections of the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen and the contemporary Gernsheim Collection.

Information

The exhibition room of the Forum Internationale Photographie is currently closed because of reconstruction.

History + Collections

The Forum Internationale Photographie (International Photography Forum) was established in 2002 thanks to the Curt-Engelhorn-Stiftung. Located on the fourth floor of the Zeughaus Museum on C5, the International Photography Forum incorporates three parts of the permanent collection displayed in regularly changing exhibitions.

The collection of historical photographs includes one-of-a-kind travel pictures and ethnographic photographs from the 19th century, which the Reiss siblings collected on their world tours and brought back with them to Mannheim. The Helmut Gernsheim Photo Collection includes a contemporary section, Gernsheim’s entire archive, and his library. These collections laid the foundation for internationally oriented, scholarly research of history of photography at the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen. The Robert Häusser Archive contains Prof. Robert Häusser’s entire photographic and bibliographic work, over 60,000 negatives, pictures, and documents. Häusser, who died in 2013, was one of the few internationally recognized postwar era German photographers who have set standards with their unmistakable personal styles.

Exceptional FIP exhibitions have included the show “World Stars of Photography” in 2008, which presented around 250 works by all of the Hasselblad Award winners. In 2012, the FIP shone with the exhibition “The Birth of Photography: Highlights of the Helmut Gernsheim Collection”, over 200 works tracing the history of photography from its beginnings to the icons of photojournalism and including the first photograph in the world – on display in Germany for the first and only time.