The Pittsburgh Photographic Library (PPL) is a

photography Photography is the visual arts, art, application, and practice of creating images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is empl ...

repository held by the

Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh is the public library system in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Its main branch is located in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, and it has 19 branch locations throughout the city. Like hundreds of other Carne ...

of over 50,000 prints and negatives relating to history of

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. It is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, second-most populous city in Pennsylvania (after Philadelphia) and the List of Un ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania, officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a U.S. state, state spanning the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern United States, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes region, Great Lakes regions o ...

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

. It is also the name of the core collection of roughly 18,000 photographs, which were taken from 1950 to 1953 as a documentation project headed by

Roy Stryker Roy Emerson Stryker (November 5, 1893 – September 27, 1975) was an American economist, government official, and photographer. He headed the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression, and launch ...

, and which subsequently gave the current repository its name.

History and notable features

PPL (People) was the brainchild of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, a Pittsburgh regional planning association launched in 1944 to rebuild and clean up the notorious Smokey City. The Allegheny Conference hired Roy Stryker in 1950 to record the city before its famous urban renewal, dubbed Renaissance I, and to shoot positive images of the "progress" for national consumption. Stryker hired professional photographers and directed the project, based at the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The university is composed of seventeen undergraduate and graduate schools and colle ...

. Stryker used such photographers as James Blair,

Esther Bubley Esther Bubley (February 16, 1921 – March 16, 1998) was an American photographer who specialized in expressive photos of ordinary people in everyday lives. She worked for several agencies of the American government and her work also featured in s ...

Harold Corsini Harold Corsini (August 28, 1919 – January 1, 2008) was an American photographer. Harold Corsini was born to Italian immigrants in New York City and began his career there as a freelancer. A photo he took when he was about 16, an aerial shot of ...

Elliott Erwitt Elliott Erwitt (born Elio Romano Erwitz, July 26, 1928 – November 29, 2023) was a French-born American advertising and documentary photographer known for his black and white candid photos of ironic and absurd situations within everyday setti ...

, Clyde Hare, Russell Lee, Sol Libsohn, and Richard Saunders. The project effectively ended in 1953, though it did continue for several more years under the direction of Marshall Stalley, and then was phased out in the late 1950s. The

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...

initially wanted to house PPL, but it was transferred to Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in June 1960.

References

* ''Witness to the Fifties: The Pittsburgh Photographic Library, 1950-1953'', Constance B. Schulz and Steven W. Plattner (editors), text by Clarke Thomas, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999).

External links

* Bob Hoover (1999)
''Pittsburgh Post-Gazette'': Book review: ''Witness to the Fifties: The Pittsburgh Photographic Library, 1950-1953''
Retrieved January 5, 2008.
Pittsburgh Photographic Library Collections
at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh {{coord, 40.44269, -79.95055, type:edu_globe:earth_region:US-PA, display=title Libraries in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania Photography museums and galleries in the United States Mass media in Pittsburgh