Fred Erismann in Wikimedia Commons

Thanks to the support of Wikimedia CH and the work of Léa Lacroix and Nicolas Vigneron, the SAPA Foundation was able to import around a thousand images by Swiss photographer Fred Erismann (1891-1979) into Wikimedia Commons.

The picture collection documents the theater productions of the Stadttheater Bern from 1933 to 1968. All the pictures come from the Fred Erismann archive. This collection comprises around 40,000 negatives, spread over more than 750 production dossiers. For the project, a selection of a thousand representative images from the individual productions was made, which were then digitized.

The import into Wikimedia Commons was supplemented by an update of the corresponding Wikidata entries for the theater productions. The links to the images were added. The Wikidata entries had already been created as part of an earlier import.

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This extensive project could be realized thanks to the generous support of Memoriav, the Burgergemeinde Bern, the City of Bern, the Canton of Bern, the Ursula Wirz Foundation and the Charlotte Kerr Dürrenmatt Foundation.