Photographic archives

The [Pallas catalogue](http://pallas.cegesoma.be/pls/opac/plsp.getplsdoc?lan=E&htdoc=general/opac.htm) provides an inventory of all of the archive collections listed by the title of each collection. It is also possible to use the online catalogue to identify individual documents in the most important collections. The photographic archives consist essentially of the collections of the Sipho agency which distributed a large element of the Belgian as well as the international press photographs from 1930 until 1944. In 1946, the Sipho responsibles were brought to trial and its collections were confiscated. In 1970 they were transferred to the Centre. This important collection (some 300,000 photographs) consists of a Belgian and an international section. It has been regularly supplemented with new acquisitions such as the collections of Otto Kropf (relating to daily life in occupied Belgium), of Raphaël Algoet (on the liberation of the German concentration camps in 1945), of André Cauvin (on Congo) and photographs from different private collections concerning mainly the Great War and the Second World War, but also the Belgian colonisation and the fifties. This project was begun in 1998 to digitise the photographic collection. More than 300,000 photographs have been inventorised and scanned and can be accessed and viewed through the [online catalogue](http://www.cegesoma.be/cms/banque_img_en.php).