Reykjavík Museum of Photography

This guide to the Reykjavík Museum of Photography follows how a shared home for the city library and photo archive came to hold roughly five million images dating back to around 1870 - mostly studio backdrops, family albums and newspaper darkroom prints never meant for a gallery wall. It traces the collection from a single private archive organized in 1981 under the name Ljósmyndasafnið to the moment Reykjavik's city government took it over and made it public. Curators rotate only a handful of prints at a time, a fisherman mending nets or a bride in 1940s wool among them.