The archive collection consists of the written, painted, audio or other recorded documentary material as well as photographs. A photograph of a person, event, facility and place is called a photo document. Unlike other archive documents that appear and testify about an event both at the time of creation and later, a photograph is always the contemporary of the things presented on it. Photographs have great importance for history and other sciences, culture and other social needs. It supplements other archive documents and sometimes, according to the quantity of information, it surpasses documents written on several pages.
The Archives together with the archival material took over photograph material created by the activity of the Institution bodies, social, political and other organizations, societies and associations.
Collection of photographs of the Archives of Yugoslavia being of special importance is formed as separate Collection that has been continually added. It is formed in the process of arrangement of archival material and processing of fonds and collections of the Archives of Yugoslavia when it was separated from archival material it is obtained by gifts and repurchase. This collection is characterized by heterogeneous photograph material both according to the type, technique and themes and time of origin. Collection preserves older photo material that is characteristic for older techniques in making photographs and modern procedures in obtaining photos – it has ferrotypes, glass photographic plaits, photo positive, photo negative, slides, postcards and photo-postcards.
It consists of more than 50.000 photographs of different provenience and over 80.000 negatives of Leica format 6x6cm, 8x6cm and 9x6cm mostly on polyester base in black-white technique.
Photo albums consisting of 249 collections of photographs presenting unique type of documentation of themes and events that happened in the past are specially authentic and valuable.
The photographs from this collection deal with people, objects and urban entities and events witnessing political, cultural , educational and economy life, first of all of Yugoslav state, The Kingdom of SCS/Yugoslavia until its end, but it has as well certain corpuses of photographs from earlier period.
Among the most significant photographic wholes of the Collection of Photographs, photographs from the collectionAJ-74( Palace of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) AJ-37 (Milan Stojadinović), AJ-38 (Central Press Bureau of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), AJ-80 (Jovan Jovanović Pižon), AJ-335 (Vojislav Jovanović Marambo), AJ-829 (Ljubomir Marić), AJ-835 (Petar and Milica Dimitrijević), AJ-110 (State Commission for Investigation of Criminals of the Occupying Forces and their Helpers), AJ-183 (American Committee for Help to Yugoslavia)AJ-144 (Federal Commission for Religious Matters), AJ-510 (Publishing Center Communist) etc. are singled out.
Overall, The Collection of Photographs of the Archives of Yugoslavia is characterized by authenticity of photo memory being inevitable source and visual witnessing of multiple values in preserving Serbian and Yugoslav cultural-political visual history and culture.