Digitized Images: "Historic Kansas Photos Get New Digital Life"

From Kansas Public Radio:

A portion of Kansas photographer Joseph J. Pennell’s work has been converted from glass negatives to digital images for the public to view. About 6,000 of Pennell’s more than 30,000 images are now available through the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas. They can be viewed on the library’s website.

From the Spencer Research Library, Kansas Collection Website

The Pennell Collection consists of more than 30,000 glass plate negatives that represent the life work of Joseph J. Pennell, a successful commercial studio photographer who worked in Junction City, Kansas, from the early 1890s to the early 1920s. It provides a comprehensive view of life in a moderately-sized, Midwestern, army-post town on the Great Plains at the turn of the last century. The University of Kansas acquired the negatives, along with 10 ledgers of business records, in 1950. Pennell’s novelist son, Joseph Stanley Pennell, was persuaded to donate them by KU faculty member Robert Taft. Taft selected 4000 images that he considered significant, printed them, and prepared a traveling exhibition, which generated a great deal of interest, especially in Kansas. In 1983, with funding provided by NEH, the entire collection was surveyed, and additional images were printed, and cataloged along with the images selected by Taft. It is this subset that has been digitized and presented

Begin Browsing Collection of Digitized Images by Joseph J. Pennell

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