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In the exhibition The Second Original, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG) will be showing rediscovered glass negatives that were made between 1897 and 1915 by the museum’s first employee, Wilhelm Weimar (1857–1917), to document museum objects. While museums once create only a limited number of photographic reproductions, today, as part of the digital indexing of their collections, they produce vast amounts of digital images, which they also make available to the public on websites. As a rule, the nature of the reproduction itself fades into the background when viewing the collection item pictured, and it thus takes on the role of a proxy. In this case, however, the materiality of the historical glass negatives with their large 18 x 24 cm format and solid, cool glass lends them a special quality and attraction. Originally produced as illustrative material, they are perceived today as photographic objects in their own right: they have become second originals. The exhibition presents these stunning image carriers and illuminates based on some 150 objects the origins of their use at MKG in a presentation divided into three sections. Apart from the glass negatives, many historical prints made from them are on view, along with slides, illustrations in publications, and today’s digital images. Viewers can trace and assess the effects of the changeover from handmade to mechanical reproductions by comparing the negatives with Wilhelm Weimar’s drawings of museum objects in pen and ink, pencil, or watercolour. A digital visualization of the complete set of 1,700 glass negatives experiments with new forms of communication. The collection of negatives was indexed and researched over the last three years as part of the interdisciplinary project PriMus – Promovieren im Museum (PhD in Museums).