Fototeka Marubi, National Photography Museum in Shkodër, Albania.
Fototeka Marubi is a photo library and museum in Shkodër that houses roughly 150,000 glass plates and photographs. This collection documents Albanian life from the 19th century onward and is displayed across multiple floors.
Pietro Marubbi, an Italian painter and photographer, founded the Photo-Studio Marubbi in Shkodër in 1856. Three generations directed and enriched the studio until the early 1950s, when Geg Marubi was forced into the photography unit of the former Repair-Services Cooperative. In 1970 Geg Marubi donated his personal archive of about 150,000 negatives, spanning 1858 to 1959, to the state, and the Fototeka Marubi was created.
The exhibitions show Albanian society through photography of independence movements, local traditions, and regional customs across generations. You can see how people lived then and what mattered to their communities.
The museum occupies the restored historic building designed by Kolë Idromeno, with the entrance marked by the "MUZEUM" sign beside the ground-floor arcade. The five arched doorways and the stone-moulded upper floor belong to that same facade, so the exhibition rooms are reached from this single street front.
Geg Marubi, the last of the dynasty, mastered infrared landscape photography after studying in France and was the first in Albania to use that developing process. The archive he gave the state holds negatives from 1858 to 1959, in formats from 6 x 9 cm glass plates up to 30 x 40 cm.
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