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The Memphis and Shelby County Photograph Collection
is located in the Memphis and Shelby County Room.
The collection consists of 11,000 local and regional photographs.
These photographs are indexed in a contact print index which
arranges the photographs alphabetically by topic (example:
Memphis - Streets - Main Street - 1888).
The works of two notable Memphis photographers are
included in the collection. J.
C. Coovert and Clifford H. Poland captured buildings, events and scenes of
everyday life in Memphis from the 1880s to the 1950s.
Major themes in the collection include bridges, buildings, the
cotton and hardwood timber industries, fairs, floods, businesses,
transportation, historic homes,
portraits and street scenes.
The Library of Congress
American Memory website has several Memphis
photographs available.
Photographs of interest include Farm Security Administration photos
of Beale Street, Memphis cotton classing houses and the Memphis Cotton
Carnival as well as photographs of historic buildings taken by the Detroit
Publishing Company and Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic
American Engineering Record (HABS/HAER). Click here
to access their index.
Of particular interest are
three Haines Photo Company
panoramic photos of downtown Memphis and three J. C. Coovert panoramas of
cotton fields.
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