Masterpieces of the world at a click - The bpk picture agency offers a highly professional service for media, business and science
Press release from 02/18/2015
With today's launch of the new image portal of the picture agency bpk www.bpk-images.de, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation is making a unique pool of high-quality images from the fields of art, culture and history available for commercial use. In the joint online shop of the world's most renowned museums, libraries and archives, users have quick and easy access to over 400,000 high-quality images.
Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, says: "In recent years, the bpk picture agency has gained an outstanding position in the German market for picture agencies specialising in art, culture and history. Anyone looking for high-quality images from these areas will not be able to avoid it, as it is the official distribution partner for over 150 German and international cultural institutions."
Hanns-Peter Frentz, head of the bpk picture agency, explains: "The images of cultural treasures that can be accessed via the bpk picture agency meet the highest quality standards and can therefore be used in a variety of ways by the media and creative industries. Variable search and filter functions simplify research in the new portal. It also offers a calendar with images for anniversaries and historical events as well as numerous portfolios that provide a preselection on various topics. Registered users can order the image data in high resolution for a fee. On customer request, a professional image research team will put together customised selections. As a special service, new images of collection objects can also be ordered if they are not yet available."
Among the approximately 150 partners represented by the bpk picture agency are the four major German museum associations Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, and at international level the Musée du Louvre, the Centre Pompidou, the Uffizi, the Vatican Museums, the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim Museum. First-class academic libraries are also represented: in addition to the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. New institutions and thus new images are constantly being added, such as currently the German Historical Museum, the Academy of Arts, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.
The bpk picture agency also offers a unique service in the German-speaking world through its network of international agency partners. It represents leading foreign picture agencies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland; conversely, it has partner agencies that represent it in the USA, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, Japan and Korea.
In addition to a strong market presence through a joint professional picture agency, there are further synergy effects for the participating cultural institutions. The joint administration and IT infrastructure for the image licence business reduce costs. Expert service personnel, strict quality management and market-oriented fee structures tailored to the respective types of use optimise image exploitation. The partner institutions not only generate royalty income via the image portal, but are also optimally prepared for a legal regulation that will soon come into force: With the new version of the Information Reuse Act (IWG) in accordance with the EU directive, public archives, libraries and museums will be obliged to make their digitised collections available to the creative industries for a fee.