The works in photographs
The firm J. Schreiber & Neffen grew out of a single Moravian glasshouse into one of the larger glass concerns of the Habsburg monarchy, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was operating plants in several regions of Central Europe at once. The photographs collected on this page show what that expansion looked like on the ground: furnace halls and annealing lehrs, the yards where crates were assembled for export, the cutting and grinding shops, and the rows of workers’ houses that grew up beside them.
Industrial photography of this kind is rarely flattering and never staged for a catalogue, which is precisely what makes it useful. The images record the machinery in place at a given moment, the scale of the workforce, the way raw batch and finished ware moved through the buildings, and the gradual replacement of hand processes by semi-automatic pressing. Read alongside the pattern books, they explain why certain shapes could be produced in quantity in one decade and not in another.
Several of the plants survived the firm itself. After 1945 the works were nationalised and reorganised, and parts of the production tradition continued under new names; a number of the buildings visible here were still in use decades later. Where a photograph can be dated it has been placed in sequence, so that the same site can be followed through successive rebuildings.
What the photographs record
Very few of these images were made for publicity. Most were taken to document a rebuilding, to record a new installation, or simply because a photographer was on the premises for another reason, and their value lies in the incidental detail: the stacking of crates in a yard, the arrangement of benches in a cutting shop, the height of a chimney against the surrounding roofs.
Where possible the photographs have been grouped by site rather than by date, so that a single works can be followed through successive campaigns of building. Captions record what can be established and say so plainly when a subject or a date is uncertain.