Explore over 500,000 Images in my personal collection

Stewardship

Hello,

My name is Wernher Krutein and I am a digital artist, photographer, filmmaker, historian and archivist. I would like to present an opportunity that I believe could be a new asset for someone’s collection.

For over sixty years, I have been creating an archive: photographing, filming, recording, organizing and assembling, not only my own ongoing life’s work, but the work of over a hundred other artists and photographers. All images, footage and collateral material are physically and digitally archived with extensive documentation preserved with the source material along with a meticulously designed database. I hope my archive of many hundreds of thousands of images from all over the planet and a wide variety of subject matter will be of interest to you.

My archive has grown to include close to 1,000,000 original negatives, slides, prints, videos, films and a plethora of ephemera. In terms of content, Photovault contains a diverse variety of images from Aerospace to Zimbabwe. Since childhood I've had a genuine interest in so many subjects, an insatiable thirst for knowledge so to speak, and my collection reflects this.

For the last six decades I have been the sole steward of this collection and I own virtually 100% of the copyright to these images. And at this time, I am looking for a new home for my archives that would involve the transfer of ownership of Photovault including copyright. I want to continue creating, collecting, archiving, and building on my life’s work. I'm searching for a relationship that will give Photovault a future to continue growing after I'm no longer here to steward it. My goal is to have this archive thrive and grow in perpetuity.

My photoshop skills/expertise - to clean-up/dust-off, polish, preserve and enhance these slides is a powerful added value. I have labeled each physical slide with place, date, and any other pertinent historical information. This data adds multifaceted value to each image and to the collection as a whole. Most of these slides/transparencies have already been digitized and cataloged.

Having purchased as many as I have, I've realized that information adds a tremendous amount of value to an image. It reiterates to me the time and money I've spent to make sure that each image in the collection is labeled with the necessary data to make the images autonomous.

Each image [physical slide] in Photovault is individually cataloged with its own unique code number and stored in a physical storage-and-retrieval system that I invented, Fluid Logic. To date, over 3,000,000 search terms proliferate in the database.

Photovault.com was first published on the internet in 1995, and this was the medium through which I could finally share my collection with the world. I originally produced it in pure .html form after having created over 10,000 pages with many links. By 2010, I completely switched over to a more powerful PHP programming language, which required hiring a back-end programmer.

For over 40 years I had an archiving staff to help me put this massive project together into a seamless and elegant user-friendly interface, which can be seen here at photovault.com. Photovault.com's success enabled me to hire staff employees and expand the archive. Being an autodidact has given me many unconventional solutions to the many problems all this has presented over the years.

I hope I was able to articulate an interest in what I have to offer. I can be reached at my facility in Petaluma at admin@photovault.com.

Sincerely,

Vern (Wernher Krutein)