The living memory of Los Angeles

The Los Angeles Public Library’s photo collection began with a Christmas Eve donation in 1914 and has grown into an archive of more than four-million images documenting the city from the 1850s to the present. Christina Rice, senior librarian for the collection, talks with Newsjunkie managing editor Peter Landau about its unlikely beginnings, overlooked newspaper archives, how researchers can find what they need, the limits imposed by copyright, and the new challenges posed by born-digital photography and generative AI.

How did the Los Angeles Public Library photo collection begin, and what was the original idea behind collecting photographs at a public library?

To the best of my knowledge, our photo collection started on Christmas Eve 1914, when a local collector named Luther Ingersoll donated his collection to us. He had been collecting very early images of Los Angeles and portraits of early Angelenos and decided to donate them to the library.

It was considered an incredibly significant collection. It got lots of press in the Los Angeles Times and was considered so significant that our former city librarian, Charles Lummis, who at the time had opened the Southwest Museum, tried to convince Ingersoll not to give the photos to the library because who knew how long the Los Angeles Public Library would be around, while the Southwest Museum, of course, would last indefinitely.

The Southwest Museum has been gone for a very long time. The Los Angeles Public Library is at 150-plus years. That was the origin of the collection, and it became a very organic thing over the decades. Collections would come to us. We weren’t actively collecting, so we ended up with early photos of Los Angeles history.

We also received a set of photos taken under the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration - 1930s Los Angeles. Ansel Adams donated a set of photos to us in the 1960s. He shot Los Angeles for Fortune magazine around 1940 and, 20-plus years later, came across the photos and literally thought they were garbage. His donation letter says, “If you don’t want these, you can put them in the incinerator.” We took the original Ansel Adams images - 217 negatives - valued at $150 total for his tax purposes.

It all fell under the history department and kept growing. Then, in 1980, Security Pacific National Bank, which had been collecting photographs since the 1920s, decided to get out of the photo-collecting business and donated its collection to us. That increased our collection by about 150,000 photos. At that point, we began putting more emphasis on collecting and created a photo department. The photo collection has had its own dedicated staff since 1986, and I am only the third person to have my job. Once we get into this position, we do not leave.

If someone thinks of the collection simply as old photographs of Los Angeles, what are they missing? What’s the real range of the material?

We have photos dating back to the 1850s, the earliest days of photography, all the way up to the present. Local photographers donate photos, and we’re always acquiring collections. For the most part, we don’t purchase collections; they’re donated. We have more than four million photos relating to the greater Los Angeles area.

One of the key collections is the photo archive of the Herald Examiner newspaper, which ranges from 1920 to 1989. That’s any news story you can think of. People create news, so it’s a lot of photos of people. As we’re recording this, Dolly Parton just passed away yesterday, and right now I’m digitizing and getting our Dolly Parton photos online because we have a handful in the Herald Examiner collection.

You’ve mentioned several significant collections. Is there one you consider particularly valuable that doesn’t receive as much attention as it deserves?

One of my personal favorites is our other newspaper archive, the Valley Times. It was published out of North Hollywood from 1946 to 1970 but covered the entire San Fernando Valley. The paper folded in 1970, and the image archive came to us through Security Pacific National Bank. The photo archive only goes up to 1965.

I think it’s an incredible look at a part of Los Angeles that was exploding in growth in the postwar era. It’s a newspaper covering the events of a major metropolitan area - the Civil Rights Movement, the Democratic National Convention in 1960 - but if Grandma was celebrating her 82nd birthday, you could call the newspaper and they would send a photographer. It does a lot of different things.

It’s not as well known as the Herald Examiner, which had been a Hearst paper, but the Valley Times is something we put resources behind because it was much more manageable than the Herald. We did fundraising and received grant funding a few years ago, and the photographs have been completely digitized. I would love for people to dive in. They can go to TESSA, tessa.lapl.org, and they do not need a library card. There are about 42,000 photos from the Valley Times. We won awards for the project, but now that we’re no longer actively putting it in the news, it doesn’t get talked about as much. Go check out the Valley Times. It’s fun.

Suppose I’m a journalist, historian or researcher who has never used the collection. Where should I begin, especially if I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for?

Go to TESSA - T-E-S-S-A - at tessa.lapl.org. It’s our site for digitized collections, and it isn’t just photos. There are maps, bookplates and a lot of different things. When you go to TESSA, you’ll see the individual collections broken down. You can go to the photo collection and browse the different collections within the larger archive.

You can also search by keyword. If you put in “Los Angeles,” you’re going to get more than 100,000 results. There are ways to do more targeted searches, but we’ve also given people the ability to browse if they don’t quite know what they’re looking for and just want to see some photos of Los Angeles.

At what point will a researcher using TESSA need to contact a librarian or come to the Central Library to take the research further?

First off, everybody should come to the Central Library. We’re celebrating our 100th anniversary this year, and it’s an incredible resource for the entire city.

When people know what they’re looking for, we ask them to exhaust the online collection first. We have a lot of photos that have not been digitized. If you’re not finding what you need, especially if you’re doing deep research, a lot of the time we’ll have material in the Herald Examiner collection. That’s probably our biggest collection with the smallest percentage digitized because it’s so massive.

People can email us. We’ll check the collection, see what we have and send research scans. It’s an archival collection, so you can’t just come to the Central Library and look through photos. We don’t have a public-facing department desk; our department was formed in 1986, after the expansion plans had already been done. So email us and tell us what you want. We’ll search the collection. If it’s a manageable number of photos, I have a scanner at my desk and we’ll send research scans. If it’s a larger selection, we might schedule an appointment for you to come in and look through them.

What are some common mistakes people make when searching a photographic archive? Are there techniques you wish more researchers knew?

Sometimes people are too specific. A lot of people want to find a particular building, and if the building is significant enough - Central Library or the Wiltern Theatre, for example - maybe we’ll have the exact address in the description. That’s not always the case.

One thing to keep in mind is that we were the second public library in the country to start digitizing photos, so we were doing it before there were best practices. It was almost a vanity project; it wasn’t considered a core service. Now digitization of archival materials is a core service to our public, and we’re very methodical and thoughtful about how we describe photos. That wasn’t the case for many years, so a lot of those early digitized photos have very general descriptions.

If you’re looking for a particular area of the city, go broad. Search by intersection or major intersections. Search for aerials. With any search, start broad and then hone in. Don’t necessarily start too specifically.

Only a fraction of the collection has been digitized. How do you decide what gets done first?

It’s a combination. A lot of what went online initially, before I took over the collection in 2009, consisted of things we got asked for all the time - those were cherry-picked out of the collection.

Sometimes we try to be methodical. The Valley Times, for example, was significant enough that we digitized all of it. We have another collection by Roland Curtis, a Black photographer in the 1960s who was a field deputy for Billy Mills and Tom Bradley, who later became our first Black mayor. The collection documents Black life in the 1960s. They’re incredible photos on 4x5 negatives, so we digitized all of those. When a cataloger is working with a collection they know well and gets into a rhythm, they can move through it.

Other times, if I find things we know are high-interest, that people are asking about or that we think they’re going to start asking about, we’ll put them online. I mentioned the Dolly Parton photos. I’ve already been asked about them, so if I can get something online quickly, we’ll do that. Sometimes it’s a methodical approach to a collection. Other times it’s, “This is what people are asking for. Let’s get it online so we never have to be asked for it again and everybody has access to it.”

Are there important collections, or portions of collections, that can’t be put online because of copyright, identification problems or other restrictions?

The Herald Examiner is a great example. They had their own photographers on staff - incredible photographers - and those photographs we are free and clear to put online. But the paper also received photos from wire services such as the Associated Press and International Newsreel. We do not have copyright on those, and they’re not unique; they were distributed around the world, so we do not put them online.

The Herald, and the Valley Times as well, also received photos from movie studios, radio stations and television stations. Again, they aren’t unique and we don’t have copyright, so we would not put those online. They also used local contract photographers, and we don’t know what the agreements were, so we usually do not put those online either. There’s a huge chunk of the Herald - up to 40 percent - that we would not put online because those photos came from outside the organization.

For journalists who find a photograph they want to publish, what do they need to understand about the difference between possessing the physical photograph, owning the copyright and granting permission to reproduce an image?

That’s a whole discussion. When we put things online, we try not to violate copyright, so in theory, everything you see on TESSA is something that can be utilized. Sometimes people come to us because they want to see Associated Press photos, and we’ll provide research scans. But if they want to reproduce or use those images, they need to go to the Associated Press for permission. If the Associated Press can’t find the photo in its archive, we need the AP to tell us it’s okay to reproduce the photo for that journalist.

For ordering and use, we have instructions and a fee schedule online. Usually for newspapers, we don’t charge a use fee, but we do request that an order form be submitted. We’ll give you a release form to sign and make sure the library is properly credited. Hopefully, anything you come across in TESSA will be something you can use.

What ethical considerations should researchers think about when publishing historical photographs, especially images of private individuals, traumatic events or communities that haven’t traditionally controlled their own representation?

There certainly are photos of that nature, particularly in the Herald Examiner collection. There are certain stories we get asked about so much that we’ve put the material online, and sometimes that’s partly to protect staff from having to revisit it over and over again. Everything dealing with Charles Manson is online, as is the Night Stalker material.

There was a particularly grisly murder involving children in the 1930s, and I couldn’t pull that folder one more time. I sent it to our cataloger and said, “I’m so sorry. We need to get these online.” We do make them available; they were published in the newspaper.

A friend of mine who serves on the board of our friends group, Photo Friends, writes about crime a lot. Her philosophy is: “Whenever you’re writing about crime, just remember that the victims of these crimes potentially still have family members who are alive.” I don’t think we need to hide these photos away from the world, but when reusing them and discussing them, ask why you’re doing it and what the point is. Keep in mind that people may still have a deep connection to what you’re talking about, and treat it as such.

We create an unimaginable number of photographs digitally. Is preserving the photographic history of Los Angeles becoming easier because of that, or harder?

The majority of our collection is still analog. Born-digital material is something we have admittedly kicked down the road a little bit, although we’re definitely more open to taking in born-digital collections now. I think it remains to be seen.

There are so many photos that it becomes overwhelming. Archives need to make a very conscientious effort about how we collect and to be thoughtful about it. When people come to me now with born-digital collections, they can’t give me everything. They have to curate it because I can’t have 50 slightly different images.

I think about what’s on my own phone. Every so often I’ll print some or maybe make a book, but for the most part I feel like this is my personal archive for my lifetime and it’s just going to die with me because it’s so overwhelming. There are too many photos for me to go back and pick through. We’re creating so much that it could become a black hole in the future if it isn’t preserved or curated.

It’s an important discussion. In my collection, it doesn’t have to be a good photograph. If it’s a crappy snapshot of an aspect of Los Angeles that we don’t have represented elsewhere, I want it. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t completely in focus or the framing is off. If it shows something we can’t find elsewhere, it has value. With everybody shooting all around the city, there are more opportunities to capture aspects of life in Los Angeles that maybe weren’t being captured on film. But the volume is so overwhelming. How are we going to harness it? I don’t have a good answer.

How is AI making your job harder, given that photographs can now be manipulated or created from whole cloth?

I feel like it hasn’t directly affected my job yet. We have analog material, so I’m glad we can pick up and look at the photos. A big aspect of my job, though, has been helping people find photos they saw online.

Separate from AI, the internet in general created this idea that if a photo is online, people can just republish it over and over again without attribution. Even thoughtful, well-researched blogs will use a photo and give no attribution. If it’s anything remotely Los Angeles and there’s no attribution, people come to us. Sometimes we even get credited for a photo that isn’t ours. That has been a challenge. Is that going to turn into people finding AI images and then thinking they’re ours? I don’t know.

I can’t overstate how much I hate generative AI. We don’t use it to create our metadata at all. Down the line, I could see it becoming an issue if somebody finds a photo and the technology gets so good that we can’t determine whether it’s a real original photograph. At that point, I don’t know whether we’ll be able to help people find it.

What photographs being taken in Los Angeles today do you think librarians 100 years from now will wish somebody had saved?

This city is forever changing. Even with all of the architectural preservation that has gone on over the last 60 years, we’re still losing things right and left. The buildings that are going to change, the restaurants that are going to come and go - that’s a lot of what we get asked for. Someone will say, “I’m looking for this restaurant I went to as a kid,” and if it wasn’t a really famous restaurant, it can be happenstance whether we have it.

One of my favorite collections is from 1978 and 1979. A 15-year-old girl and her mother, who was an architectural historian, spent every Tuesday after school photographing Wilshire Boulevard. Wilshire runs from downtown all the way to Santa Monica, about 16 miles, and they photographed the whole boulevard. It’s around 900 Kodachrome slides. People have contacted me looking for a particular bar on Wilshire Boulevard, and because this teenager and her mom photographed the entire boulevard, there it is.

With Los Angeles changing so much, capturing these moments in time in the built environment is going to be valuable later on. Ed Ruscha did something similar with Sunset Boulevard. His approach was much more uniform, while this 15-year-old was also making artsier images. Both are very Los Angeles.