By Jennifer Glickel
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
EAST HARLEM – The Museum of the City of New York is working on a multi-year project to digitize its collection of more than 350,000 prints and photographs documenting the history of the city.
The images, which date back to the 1890s, capture glimpses of the city’s changing physical, social, and political landscape throughout the 20th century.
“The museum started collecting photography as pure documentation of a changing city over time,” Susan Henshaw Jones, director of the MCNY, told DNAinfo.
“We started collecting before museums had deemed photography an art,” she said. “They have all risen to the level of art.”
The museum’s collection includes images by famed architectural photographer Berenice Abbott, social documentary photographer Jacob Riis, quintessential turn-of-the-century Manhattan commercial photographer Percy Byron, and notable New York architectural photographer Samuel Gottscho, much of whose work is in the U.S. Library of Congress in the Gottscho-Schleisner collection.
“The purpose of digitizing all of these photos is for the public’s discovery of these rich resources that have only really been known up here on 104th Street,” Henshaw Jones said.
She believes the images will be of great interest to social historians, architectural historians, and teachers, but hopes that average New Yorkers and curious visitors will seek out the digital collection as well.
The digitizing project began in August 2008, and so far about 50,000 photographs have been digitally captured.
The museum’s goal is to also include 42,000 prints, drawings, and other data in the initial online collection, which is expected to be viewable on the museum’s Web site this summer.
