Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection

  • Description
  • Visual images from the 1900s-1970s commissioned by the Pittsburgh Department of Public Works show parks, recreation facilities, and athletic events as well as hospital exteriors and interiors, mayoral events, traffic situations, and general street scenes of Pittsburgh.
  • Depositor
  • University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection

What's online?

The Pittsburgh City Photographer online collection features images as commissioned by the Department of Public Works, Division of Photography, City of Pittsburgh for the years 1901-1979. The images selected for the online collection show Pittsburgh parks, recreation facilities, and athletic events as well as hospital exteriors and interiors, mayoral events, traffic situations, and general street scenes.

What's in the entire collection?

The collection, held by the Archives Service Center (ASC) at the University of Pittsburgh, comprises more than 150,000 film negatives, glass plate negatives, and photographic prints spanning the years 1890 through 2002. It is a diverse and thorough representation of neighborhoods, city growth, and cultural diversity.

About Pittsburgh City Photographer

The City Photographers' tasks included, but were not limited to, documenting the construction of roads, bridges, sewers, and other public works projects in the city of Pittsburgh. They were commissioned from various bureaus such as the Health Department, the Bureau of Recreation, the Transit Commission, the Department of Law, the Bureau of Water, the Department of Child Welfare, and the Bureau of Engineering. Few office records exist for the City Photographers, thus the origin and work routine of that position can only be conjectured through the photographs themselves.

The position of City Photographer, as it had been known since its official inception in 1907, was eliminated in the early 1970s, and the office suite used by the photographers on the fifth floor of the City-County Building was turned over to the Mayor's Office. While the Division of Photography under the Department of Public Works ceased to exist, the Department of Supplies still maintains a city photographer in the Public Safety building. Unlike the work done by the previous City Photographer, this position is essentially that of a police department photographer.

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