With a stock of almost 450,000 pictures, the Museum am Rothenbaum has a unique photographic collection. The oldest photograph known to us was taken in 1858, only seven years after the first glass plate negative was made. Some of the photographs are particularly noteworthy, such as Eduard Arning's paper negatives from Hawaii in 1885. Other outstanding objects are the coloured autochromes in the grain raster process from the early 20th century with motifs from Bolivia by Franz Bandholz. Equally important are the more than 300 platinum types of Mayan ruins that Teobert Maler created from 1875 onwards or the presumably first colour photographs from Yemen that Carl Rathjens captured on the then innovative Agfacolor New Slide Film in 1937, which, in addition to numerous private photo albums and pictorial materials from the history of research and teaching, contain important stocks of expedition photographs. They originate, for example, from the so-called Inner Africa expedition of Duke Adolf Friedrich to Mecklenburg in 1910/11 or the Hamburg South Sea expedition between 1908 and 1910, but also the convolute of Hans Heinrich Brüning from South America, the photographs of Johan Adrian Jacobsen from the American Northwest Coast as well as the former Museum Godeffroy collection with its focus on Oceania are in the international focus of critical cultural-historical image research.