The Tribune Photographs Collection: the city's picture archive

1937–1999 — twenty-one cabinets, ninety-four boxes

The archive: The Tribune's negatives are the city's picture archive, and their home telling is in the Libraries file, where the collection's keeper stands; what belongs here is the photographers' side of it — the scale of what the staff tradition produced. The finding aid of the South Bend Tribune Photographs Collection, held by the St. Joseph County Public Library's Local & Family History department, measures the surviving archive at twenty-one cabinets and ninety-four boxes of negatives and transparencies, dated 1937–1999 with the bulk from 1950–1999; the library's own release puts the gift at "as many as one million photographs" taken by Tribune photographers. The paper was sold in 2019, its new home had no room for the archive, and the collection came to the library by gift on 20 May 2019. Under a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, librarians digitized more than 10,000 of the negatives, released to the public on Michiana Memory on 2 September 2021. The finding aid is candid about the archive's wounds: negatives were lost to theft and misplacement by employees over the years; a portion of the collection — some sixty-seven to seventy-five boxes — went temporarily to the History Museum about 1992 and came back; and the aid names the most notable gap outright: there is no coverage in the collection of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s visit to South Bend on 18 October 1963. What the staff photographers shot survives, then, as the largest but not a complete record — a million-frame memory with named holes in it.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune Photographs Collection finding aid (St. Joseph County Public Library, Local & Family History Services; via Michiana Memory / Digital Public Library of America) — dates 1937–1999, bulk 1950–1999; twenty-one cabinets and ninety-four boxes; the theft-and-misplacement losses; the c. 1992 History Museum episode; the absence of coverage of the 18 October 1963 King visit.
2. St. Joseph County Public Library, "Library Releases Online Local Photo Archive" (2 September 2021) — the gift of as many as one million photographs; the 2019 sale and the new home's lack of room; the IMLS grant; more than 10,000 negatives digitized and released on Michiana Memory.
3. Cross-reference: Libraries — the archive's home, the department that keeps it, and the gift's place in the library's own history.