Skip to Main Content

Slovenian Collections in the Library of Congress

Prints and Photographs

Detroit Publishing Company. Laibach, a view on the Laibach, Carniola, Austro-Hungary. [between ca. 1890 and ca. 1900]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Reading Room.

Most of the holdings related to Slovenia in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Reading Room are from non-Slovenian sources such as American news service collections or captured German documents from the World War II era. Overall, Slovenian photographic content in the Library of Congress is very modest.

A pertinent example of a general photographic collection with interesting Slovenian content is the Photochrom Print Collection by the Photoglob Company in Zürich, Switzerland, and the Detroit Publishing Company in Michigan. Part of this collection is called Views of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which depicts landscapes, street scenes and architectural monuments in Slovenia.

A partially digitized collection with some photos of Slovenia is the New York World-Telegram and the Sun newspaper photograph collection. Images depict architectural monuments and a wooden church in the Slovenian Alps.

The Library of Congress holds several collections with content related to Slovenia that were confiscated by United States military intelligence after World War II such as an album of the Jugoslawien-Bulgarienfahrt des NSKK from 1937 containing 99 shots of a trip taken by the National Socialist Motor Corps through Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, including stops in Bled, Novo Mesto, and Ljubljana. The collection of 1500 photographic prints of the Worldwide Activities of the Deutsche Akademie, 1938-1943, an organization formed to establish German study-groups in foreign countries, also has content of potential interest for those researching Slovenian history. Only some of the images from these collections have been digitized.

Other collections listed under Yugoslavia also yield relevant images, for instance the collection of 37 portraits of Tito and Yugoslav leaders produced by the Telegrafnoe agentstvo SSSR. Included are leaders representing Slovenia like Edvard Kardelj, Janez Vipotnik, and Zoran Polič. A more contemporary collection is the Annenberg Space for Photography exhibit in 2016 on refugees, which contains some contemporary photos of refugees passing through Slovenia in the 2000s.

Search for visual materials at the Library of Congress using the search box on the Library's home page and limit your search to "Photos, Prints, Drawings" or search in the Library's Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC).

About the Prints & Photographs Division

Unique in their scope and richness, the picture collections number more than 16 million images. These include photographs, historical prints, posters, cartoons, documentary drawings, fine prints, and architectural and engineering designs. While international in scope, the collections are particularly strong in materials documenting the history of the United States and the lives, interests, and achievements of the American people..