The Town That Can't Show Its Own Pictures
A public library pays rent on a storage unit holding about two hundred thousand photographs of Poughkeepsie's twentieth century, but it doesn't own them and can't freely put them online.
FactUnion VerifiedEvery fact on the episode's fact sheet was checked against its sources. Wrong facts were corrected. What this meansFacts checked 26 Oct 2026
Chapters (8)
About this episode
When the Poughkeepsie Journal's corporate owner moved its operations out in 2019, a newspaper photo morgue of roughly two hundred thousand images was left with nowhere to go. After a lot of "No's", the public library district agreed to pay rent on a storage unit and take the boxes. Gannett kept the rights. Wren and Theo follow what happens when the people holding a town's pictures and the company owning them are no longer the same, and why that can be a quieter kind of loss than a fire.
Along the way: RCA Victor negatives saved from destruction that still took more than a year to sort, a parish photographer's albums pulled from a dumpster, Mathew Brady's plates sold off after his bankruptcy, and the fact that, according to Chronogram, nobody keeps a national count of newspaper photo archives that have been lost. The stewardship agreement's text hasn't been published, and none of the coverage we found includes a response from Gannett or reports any change since the March 2026 conference.
Hosted by Wren and Theo, performed by synthetic voices. Supported by ShotBreak.
Facts and sources
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182 of 182 recorded lines matched the checked script.
The Poughkeepsie Public Library District agreed in 2019 to pay rent on a dedicated storage unit and took on physical custodianship of the Poughkeepsie Journal’s photo archive.
Chronogram reports that the library ‘doesn’t own the archive’ and ‘can’t freely digitize it or put the images online,’ because the intellectual property still belongs to Gannett.
Researchers estimate the archive holds ‘well over 200,000 images’ spanning much of the 20th century.
Chronogram writes that Gannett ‘owns the rights and licenses images when asked, often for a few hundred dollars a use.’
In Chronogram’s narration, when Kafui Attoh tried to publish one of the morgue’s photographs, ‘Gannett could quote a price, but couldn’t reliably locate or deliver the original high-quality print.’
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Chronogram says no national body tracks what happens to newspaper photo archives, so the number lost is unknown.
The exhibition ‘The Buried Image’ ran Feb 19 to March 5 at Vassar’s Palmer Gallery, with artists Emilie Houssart, Onaje Benjamin and Xuewu Zheng; Vassar’s event page gives the conference date as March 7, 2026.
Emilie Houssart was one of three local artists whom Kafui Attoh and Jamie Kelly asked to accompany the March conference.
Vassar reports that the stewardship agreement was negotiated in 2019 by Gannett and the Poughkeepsie Public Library District, under which Gannett retains ownership while the Library District is empowered to ensure the photos and news articles are preserved.
Former Journal executive editor Meg Downey said that before the deal she, retired Court of Appeals Judge Albert Rosenblatt, Library Director Tom Lawrence and others had searched for some entity to take custody: ‘We got a lot of “No’s” until the Library District stepped in.’
Kira Thompson, the Library District employee in charge of the material, was its Historian when the project began in 2020; she said, ‘Some boxes of material still have not been sorted, some have water damage, and some photo plates are stuck together,’ and ‘It’s far from a tidy operation.’
Frank LoMonte said, ‘The threat of being sued by those who own these files is problematic,’ and ‘The goal is to gather the material first, then sort out the legal ramifications later.’
LoMonte also said, ‘hats off to Gannett for at least letting the Poughkeepsie Library District preserve this material,’ and that about one-third of US counties have no local newspaper.
The Library of Congress lists public institutions by state that have at least one newspaper photograph morgue.
A March 19, 2025 reprint on ai-ap.com of David Schonauer’s piece ‘Photo History Is Disappearing, One Archive at a Time’ says traditional archives are vanishing, especially in local journalism, and directs readers to the Washington Post for the full story.
Hagley’s RCA Victor negatives collection is about 124,000 negatives in 298 boxes, salvaged from destruction in 1993 by RCA company historian Frederick O. Barnum III.
Hagley planned to digitize a selection of the RCA negatives ‘by the end of the year’; the page does not say whether that happened.
A Washington City Paper writer who, as parish sexton, helped run the estate sale says he rescued about 2,200 prints from a dumpster in November 2009, about 32 of as many as 500 albums made by Ray Honda.
Ray Honda (1929 to 2008) was a Japanese American civilian at the Defense Mapping Agency and the unofficial photographer at Our Lady of Victory; the writer says the albums not saved went into a trash truck.
Executor Father David Wering and the late Georgetown curator Nicholas Scheetz tried to find a home for the Honda trove, but the Scheetz custody deal fell through before the archive could be collected.
Mathew Brady’s negatives were sold at auction after his bankruptcy; Secretary of War William Belknap bought part in 1874 for $2,500, and the government bought 3,735 plates for $25,000 in 1875.
About 4,500 negatives by Capa, Taro and Chim went missing in 1939 and reached the International Center of Photography in December 2007; the frame behind ‘The Falling Soldier’ is still missing.
A 1937 darkroom fire at Best’s Studio in Yosemite destroyed ‘about a fifth’ of Ansel Adams’s negatives according to the Ansel Adams Gallery; other estimates run up to a third.
Removed during checking (3)
Some filing-cabinet drawers were empty at the start, and a drawer on Timothy Leary that was missing was later found.
Processing the RCA Victor negatives took more than a year, led by Audiovisual Reference Archivist Lynsey Sczechowicz with volunteers who transcribed index cards into a spreadsheet.
Hagley's archivists describe over 30,000 unidentified RCA negatives; about 10% of the collection is severely damaged, and 'a few thousand' negatives are too damaged to make accessible.
