Sven Türck from The Royal Library, Denmark

Türck’s pictures give us a photographic impression of Danish society during the 1930s and 1940s. The cities have grown and rural life is already distant to many people. Clerks and sales women are biking through the streets or enjoying leisure time on the beach. Castles and manors are destinations for tourists, timbered housing is considered as part of a national romantic building style, while new housing in international style rises, such as the Hotel Astoria near the Copenhagen Central Railway Station and the Blidah Park apartment in Hellerup, north of Copenhagen.

The photographer documents children playing hopscotch in the yard or Christmas shoppers on a snowy street in Copenhagen. He catches the sun light and the Sunday mood under the foliage in Dyrehaven, a park north of Copenhagen, and he takes numerous pictures of historical buildings, modern architecture, harbors, bridges etc. He selects his motives carefully for the purpose of capturing the beautiful, the happy, the free spirit. The crisis of the 1930s, mass unemployment and social problems are invisible in the world of Türck.
The Royal Library, which comprises the National Library and Copenhagen University Library, belongs under the jurisdiction of the Danish Ministry of Culture.
We are Denmark's national library and the university library for the University of Copenhagen.
Our mission is to promote education and research and the spread of knowledge, now and in the future.
The Department of Maps, Prints and Photographs, under the National Library, was established in 1902.
This enabled the library to gather all materials such as maps, globes, prints, drawings and other illustrations acquired since its foundation in 1653 in one place.
Today the department has approximately 16 million items, mostly photographs, but also 275.000 maps, 7.500 atlasses and 32 globes.
The department collects Danish as well as foreign materials, but primarily Danish maps, atlasses and globes.