Behind-the-Scenes is a series in which we share stories of the work we do hidden from view, and more recently what we accomplished during our year-long hiatus from public service.
In this post, we highlight the importance of digitization as preservation. Learn more about our ongoing preservation efforts and how you can help by visiting our Crowdrise page.
Digitizing Street Photography Collections
During the year-long hiatus from public services, the Historical Society sent its most-used collections offsite to be digitized, a process that can take up to 8 weeks to complete. Digitizing photographic material is important for the long-term conservation of a collection because it means original material is handled less frequently by patrons and staff.
Since 2016, the Historical Society has been raising funds to have its two most popular street photography collections digitized: the John P. Wymer Photograph Collection and the Emil A. Press Slide Collection. These collections in particular are requested and used frequently by a wide variety of research patrons, including architectural historians, real estate agents, genealogists, and neighborhood residents.
John P. Wymer Photograph Collection
This collection consists of about 4,000 black and white images of Washington, D.C. taken between 1948 and 1952. John Wymer (1904 -1995) was a statistician at the Bureau of Standards, a D.C.-transplant, and amateur photographer. He designed this photography project as a way to get to know his adopted city.
Wymer took an analytical approach to this project and divided the city into 57 equally-sized areas and systematically photographed the streetscapes of the District’s neighborhoods – capturing houses, churches, gas stations, office buildings, parks, bridges, and businesses. It is the comprehensive nature of this collection that makes it so useful to students of mid-century Washington.
The Wymer collection consists of photographs pasted into scrapbooks, his field notebooks, negatives, hand-drawn maps, and neighborhood descriptions.
Emil A. Press Slide Collection
Emil Press (1904 – 1987) was an amateur photographer and a life-long D.C. resident. Born and raised in Swampoodle, he graduated from McKinley Technical High School before earning a degree in civil engineering from The George Washington University. Press worked as a civil engineer for the District of Columbia Government before joining DeLeuw Cather and Company where he participated in much of the early planning associated with the Metro system.
The Emil A. Press Collection includes 4,000 color images taken from the late 1950s – early 1970s. It documents the changing built environment of the District; from the post-war years into the transition to rapid transit transportation.
Street Photography
Street photography makes up the largest subset of photographic materials in the Historical Society’s collection. As the name implies, street photography is photographs, negatives, or slides of the built or natural environment. The Historical Society’s street photography covers every decade of the District since the 1850s, taken by amateurs and professionals who walked the streets of D.C. and documented what they found.
To find more street photography collections, search the online catalog. In addition to Wymer and Press, other notable collections include the J. Harry Shannon “The Rambler” Collection (1900 – 1927), Garnet W. Jex “Central City” Slide Collection (1957-1975), and Zinnia “DC Changes” Photograph Collection (1984 – 1995).
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Future Projects
Want to help fund more projects like this? Support the digitization of the Historical Society’s microfilm collection and the rebinding of the real estate atlas collection by chipping in to the Crowdrise fundraising campaign. Digitization and rebinding are essential to the long-term care of these collections.
Real estate atlases are building-level surveys of the District of Columbia (1878-1968). They arranged geographically in four volumes with multiple editions per volume. They show the footprint of each building in the District of Columbia during each year the survey was conducted.
Reviewing real estate atlases chronologically can help determine approximate date of building construction and track neighborhood development through time as well as identifying street address, square and lot number, and subdivision name at a given point in time. Basic information about lot and building shape is given; patrons can look at multiple editions to determine if changes were made to the shape of the lot or structure.
Microfilm
The Historical Society’s microfilm holdings include 19th century censuses, directories, D.C. legislation and legal documents, 20th century newspapers, and more. With enough funding, this important collection of microfilm will be digitized so that it can be accessed via computer. A full inventory is available by request via library@dchistory.org or in the reading room after the Kiplinger Research Library reopens on August 27.