Crowd listens outside radio shop at Greenwich and Dey Sts. for news on President Kennedy. Photo by O. Fernandez for World Telegram & Sun, 1963 Nov. 22. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c32849
Historic news photographs offer an immediacy and perspective on past events that make them among the most popularly requested items in our collections.
The Prints & Photographs Division’s New York World-Telegram & the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection is a case in point. Consisting of an estimated one million photographs that the newspaper assembled between the 1890s and 1967 (chiefly 1920 to 1967), this newspaper photo “morgue” is typical of the files that newspapers maintain of images that either were published or were believed to have some future publication potential.
Newsroom of the New York Times. Photo by Marjory Collins, 1942. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c12968
Other repositories hold similarly rich newspaper photo morgues, often with a local or regional emphasis that is not represented in the Library of Congress holdings. To help you find newspaper photograph collections held by other institutions, we recently added to our Web site a new resource list, “Newspaper Photograph Morgues.” The list cites public institutions in the United States and Canada that have custody of at least one newspaper photograph morgue—more than forty institutions in all. Archivists at many repositories contributed information, with the newest entries provided by the Society of American Archivists’ Visual Materials section members.
If you need to know where you can find the photo files of a particular newspaper, such as the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, or you wonder where you could locate historic photographs from a specific city, such as Montreal or Newark, New Jersey, this list will help you locate the institutions to contact. And if you have information to add, please let us know!
Learn more:
- View an overview of the New York World-Telegram & the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection
- View a list maintained by the Newspaper & Current Periodical Reading Room, citing resources and locations for newspaper archives: “Newspaper Archives/Indexes/Morgues“