The Pittsburgh Photographic Library (PPL) is a

photography Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable 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 employed ...

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 Carn ...

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

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

. It is also the name of the core collection of roughly 18,000 photographs, which were taken from 1950-1953 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 launc ...

, and which subsequently gave the current repository its name. PPL (People) was the brainchild of the

Allegheny Conference on Community Development The Allegheny Conference on Community Development is a nonprofit, private sector leadership organization dedicated to economic development and quality of life issues for a 10-county region in southwestern Pennsylvania, United States centered aro ...

, 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 The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas ...

, 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 public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the universit ...

. 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, Elliott Erwitt, 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 the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...

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 Libraries in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania Photography museums and galleries in the United States Mass media in Pittsburgh {{pittsburgh-stub