Our road to Santos

The challenge of transporting 6.5 million photographic objects

Safeguarding Dutch photographic heritage is one the main roles of the museum. At the forefront of this effort is the Moving Team. It’s their task to prepare our collection to be transported to our new home, the landmark Santos building.

Although it’s just a 5-minute drive from our current location, the Moving Team has been preparing since December 2023. The amount of preparation work is enormous. We are working on a detailed plan for packing the thousands of archival boxes of negatives and slides.

We selected Imming Logistics, which specializes in art, to transport our collection. They helped us pack some of the larger or more awkward objects such as the framed works, big prints and cameras.

Every archival box, framed work, print and book must be packed, moved from its climate-controlled space, loaded on a truck and carefully driven to Santos. Once the truck arrives, every piece must be carefully unloaded, transported to the depot space and placed in its climate-controlled location.

Our 80,000 glass plate negatives and positives are fragile and need to be handled with care. During transport, the glass plates must be placed in the direction the truck will be driving, to avoid shocks transferring through the glass plates and putting too much pressure on each other.

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