From copper engraving to press photo: The Department of Picture Archives and Graphics is the biggest location for picture documentation in Austria with holdings of about 2 million objects of the most varied historical types of media. It is an archive, a library, a scholarly picture agency, and a reproduction service all in one.

The Department of Graphics holds today more than 600,000 printed graphics, water colours, drawings, and objects of art, as well as the archives of the former Imperial Entailed Estate Library. The most expansive holdings are made up of the approximately 200,000 printed graphic portraits of important persons from the age of antiquity to the present day. The collection of pamphlets includes about 10,000 prints from the period 16th to 19th centuries. The bookplate collection has over 50,000 small graphics from the start of the modern age till now.

Among the most important holdings of the Picture Archives today are the photographic bequests of Madame d’Ora and Lucca Chmel, the archives of the photo journalist Harry Weber, and the earliest coloured plates of the artistic photographer Heinrich Kühn. Recently the photo collection of the Austrian Press Agency (APA) with its press photos from 1985 to the present is being archived here.

Approximately 1 million photographic negatives from the historical archives of the Picture Archives and the newly acquired bequests of important Austrian photographers and graphic artists, and the approximately 100,000 posters make the Department of Picture Archives and Graphics of the Austrian National Library the outstanding location of historical and modern photographs and posters in Austria.