As part of the programme of activities intended to make widely available the images held in its archives, the Negri Foundation publishes a range of books under its own name, edited and produced in the offices of the original first Negri studio.
High standards of quality are maintained in the choice of paper, the hard-back, the book covers and in the printing techniques, a policy which guarantees the best possible presentation of the historical images contained in the pages of these publications.
The texts are composed by a competent Italian expert for each relevant subject.
The Negri Foundation takes its inspiration from family traditions and day to day experimentation. More than 100,000 images that cover a period of 120 years plus are stored in a computer archive system that facilitates research, together with dozens of books and exhibition documents used in projects currently under way in collaboration with public and privately owned institutions, as well as with private individuals.
These are images often used in old company catalogues or in newspaper reports about the birth and development of well known companies, (“reportages” ante litteram,) pictures of machinery and machine tools, of products made by specialist workmen, of technicians and fourth generation captains of industry, old photographs of cities and sites in Lombardy and much more besides.
We need to examine the past, the better to understand the present.
It is possible now to consult a considerable proportion of the images currently held in these photographic archives, which are catalogued under three separate database titles.
The number of images contained in these archives is constantly brought up to date as a daily catalogue programme has been implemented.
Nevertheless, this number is currently still a minority of the total quantity of images held in the archives.