The history of photography in Albania begins with the Italian photographer Pietro Marubbi, who settled in the city of Shkodra during the second half of the nineteenth century and opened the first photography studio there in 1858. The Marubi, the National Photography Museum and Albania’s first photography museum, opened in May 2016. The core of its collection is comprised of what was formerly the contents of the Marubi Photothèque. Having no children of his own, Pietro Marubbi’s first assistants and faithful successors in the field of photography were Mati and Kel Kodheli, the sons of his gardener Rrok Kodheli.

Pietro sent Mati, the older of the two brothers, to Italy to study photography at the Sebastianutti & Benque studio in Trieste. When Mati died at age nineteen, Pietro adopted Kel, whom he also sent to Italy to study and who would later assume the surname Marubi. Upon Pietro’s death in 1903, Kel inherited his adopted father’s studio and continued its work. He, in turn, was followed into business by his own son, Gegë Marubi, who studied photography and cinematography in France at the Lumière brothers’ studio. In the archives of the museum, you can find negatives with themes from ethnography, urbanism, cultural monuments, history, bazaar, sailing in Buna, etc. Gegë Marubi, the last of the Marubi dynasty, was a master of infrared portrait and landscape. What is notable through three generations of photographers is the desire to be modern, and as such, to stay abreast of contemporary aesthetic trends and new technologies.

With the onset of Communist rule in the 1940s, when every private enterprise was prohibited by law and he was unable to independently use and/or promote his own work or that of his ancestors, Gegë Marubi was forced to turn over his family’s archive to the state. This way, although unable to remain in private business, he could oversee the Marubi archive.

From their archive, the Marubi Photothèque was founded as a division of the Historical Museum of Shkodra. It remained a part of this museum until 2003, when it became an autonomous institution. The Marubi museum preserves and promotes this collection of more than five hundred thousand negatives dating from the second half of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. The Marubi family archive, along with archives of many other photographers in the museum’s holdings, document pivotal moments in Albanian social, cultural, and political life over the course of a century and a half. The archive is very rich and contains about 500,000 photographs, all from negatives, glass, and film rolls, of various sizes.