Al and Jean Burgert opened a commercial photography studio in Tampa around 1917.
They were not documentary photographers and they were not making art. They were taking the jobs that came in. A business wanted its new storefront photographed. A developer wanted a street recorded. A club wanted its members lined up. The Florida State Fair wanted coverage. Somebody was opening a bank, a church, a cigar factory, a bridge.
They did that for about forty-five years, and the accumulated result is the most complete visual record of Tampa Bay’s transformation that exists.
What is in the collection
More than twenty thousand black and white photographs, spanning roughly 1850 to 1963. The earlier material predates the studio and came in as part of the archive.
Over fifteen thousand of the negatives have been developed, digitised and indexed, and are searchable on the library’s own site. Thousands more remain unprinted, sitting in boxes.
Then the unusual part: four hundred and thirty-nine Cirkut prints. Cirkut cameras rotate to produce a single continuous panoramic exposure. These prints are ten inches high and vary enormously in length, with some reaching nearly five feet.
A five-foot photograph of Tampa in the 1920s is not something you experience on a screen. You have to stand in front of it and walk along it.
What it shows
The subject range is what makes it useful, and it is wider than a list of landmarks.
Ybor City. Port Tampa. Temple Terrace. Ballast Point. Street scenes, businesses, churches, houses, port work. The Gasparilla Pirate Festival and the Florida State Fair, both extensively.
Also, and this is the part researchers care about most, ordinary life. People at the beach. People playing golf, tennis, shuffleboard, checkers. Local celebrations. A community at leisure, in the clothes they wore, standing in front of buildings that in most cases are no longer there.
Commercial photography is unintentionally the best social record there is, because a photographer paid to document a storefront also documents the pavement, the signage, the cars parked outside and whoever happened to be walking past.
How it ended up in a library
The Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library bought the collection in its entirety in 1974, with the stated intention of making it accessible to the public.
That is a decision worth pausing on. In 1974 nobody was certain this material would matter. A defunct commercial studio’s negatives are, at the point of sale, just boxes. Somebody at that library looked at them and understood what they were.
The collection now lives in the History and Genealogy Department on the fourth floor of the John F. Germany Public Library in downtown Tampa, in a climate-controlled vault.
The University of South Florida holds a digital collection of Burgert images as well, with several hundred available online, which is a reasonable place to start before making a trip.
What a Cirkut camera was
The four hundred and thirty-nine panoramic prints in this collection deserve their own explanation, because the technology that made them is gone and the results are unlike anything a modern camera produces.
A Cirkut camera rotates on its base during the exposure while the film advances past the lens at a matched speed. The result is a single continuous image instead of several photographs stitched together, which means there are no seams and no software guesses. What the camera swept past is what is on the film.
These prints are ten inches high and vary enormously in length, some reaching nearly five feet. They were used for the things that needed a wide frame: assembled crowds, industrial sites, hotel frontages, groups too large to fit any other way.
The effect in person is closer to standing somewhere than looking at a picture. Your eye travels the print the way the camera travelled the scene, and the far ends were photographed seconds apart, which occasionally produces oddities where somebody moved during the sweep.
A five-foot photograph of Tampa in the 1920s cannot be experienced on a screen, and that is the single best argument for making the trip to the fourth floor instead of working from the digital index.
What was happening while they photographed it
The value of the archive is partly the period it spans, which happens to cover the transformation of this region.
The studio opened around 1917 and the collection runs to 1963. Inside those decades Tampa went from a working port and cigar town to a modern American city, through a land boom, a bust, a depression, a war and the postwar expansion that produced most of what is here now.
A commercial photographer was hired throughout all of it, by the people building the thing. New storefronts, new banks, new bridges, new subdivisions, opening days, civic occasions. Which means the archive is a record of a place being constructed, photographed by somebody paid to make it look good and therefore paying close attention.
The Ybor material is the part most researchers reach for first, and I have written separately about why that square mile carries more material than anywhere else in the region and about the lectores paid to read novels aloud in the cigar factories.
But the ordinary material matters more than the landmarks. People at the beach. People playing golf, tennis, shuffleboard and checkers. Local celebrations. The Florida State Fair and the Gasparilla Pirate Festival, extensively. That is a community at leisure, in the clothes they wore, standing in front of buildings that in most cases are gone.
How a writer uses it
Four ways, in rough order of how often they come up.
Setting. If a scene happens on a Tampa street in 1931, the photographs tell you what the street looked like, what the signage said, how wide the pavement was and what was parked on it. That level of specificity is what makes historical fiction feel researched instead of costumed.
Clothing and objects. What people wore to a fair, to church, to work at the port. What a shop window held. What a car looked like with three years of Florida sun on it.
Buildings that are gone. A great deal of what these photographs show has been demolished. For anybody writing about a family, a neighbourhood or a business that no longer exists, this is often the only surviving image.
And light. Photographs from a specific place and decade carry information about weather, shadow and glare that no written description reproduces. Florida light is particular, and seeing it in period black and white tells you something.
For the Ybor material specifically, I have written about why that square mile carries more material than anywhere else in the region and about the lectores who were paid to read novels aloud in the cigar factories.
Reading a photograph as evidence
Most people look at a historical photograph, register the subject, and move on. For research purposes the subject is the least useful thing in the frame.
Start with the edges. A commercial photographer framed for the client’s storefront, which means the buildings either side were captured incidentally and without any attempt to flatter them. Those neighbours are often the only surviving image of themselves.
Then the ground. Paving, kerbs, tracks, mud, drainage. Whether the street was surfaced tells you what year you are looking at more reliably than the cars do.
Then the signage, which is where prices, business names, telephone exchanges, and the local idiom all live. A shop window in 1931 advertises in the language people used, not the language we assume they used.
Then the people who wandered into the frame. Not the posed subjects, who are dressed for the photograph, but whoever happened to be walking past in ordinary clothes on an ordinary Tuesday. That is the wardrobe reference nobody poses for.
And finally the light and the shadows, which tell you the season and roughly the hour, and which carry information about Florida glare that no written description reproduces.
This is the discipline that separates research from browsing, and an archive of this size rewards it enormously.
Before you drive over
Start online, because more than fifteen thousand of these images are digitised and indexed on the library’s own site, and the University of South Florida holds a digital collection as well with several hundred available.
Search broadly at first. Archive indexing reflects what a cataloguer thought the subject was, which is not always what you would call it. Street names change, neighbourhoods get renamed, and businesses are filed under owner names you do not know yet.
If you find what you need online, you may never need the building. If you do need the building, go on a weekday and go to the fourth floor, where the Florida History and Genealogy Library sits alongside the photographic archive.
That floor is open to the general public with no library card required, and materials are for in-library use only, so plan a working session instead of a collection trip.
Downtown Tampa parking is the honest difficulty. Plan for a garage and a walk, or use the bus, which serves the building on several routes.
And ask at the desk. Staff who work with a collection daily know what is in it in ways no index captures, which is the same argument that applies to every reference desk in this county.
Seeing the collection
Start online. Search the library’s digital index and see whether what you need is among the fifteen thousand already digitised. That costs nothing and answers most questions.
Go in person for the rest: the unprinted negatives, the Cirkut panoramas, and anything where you need to see the actual print.
The fourth floor of the Germany library also holds one of the largest genealogy collections in the southeastern United States, open to the general public with no library card required, materials for in-library use only. If you are making the trip for photographs, the family records are in the same room.
Downtown Tampa parking is the honest difficulty. Plan for a garage, or use the bus, which serves the building on several routes.
What happens to archives nobody buys
The 1974 purchase is the reason any of this exists, and it is worth understanding what the alternative looks like.
A commercial photography studio that closes leaves behind boxes of negatives with no obvious owner and no obvious value. The photographer is gone. The clients who commissioned the work are gone or no longer care. Nobody has catalogued it, because cataloguing was never the point; these were job files.
What usually happens next is dispersal. Some negatives go to family, some to a dealer, some to a dumpster. Individual prints surface at estate sales for years afterwards, stripped of the information that made them useful. A photograph of a building with no date, no address and no name attached is decoration, not evidence.
The Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library bought the collection in its entirety, which is the word that matters. Entire means the sequence survives, the job numbers survive, and the relationships between images survive. A photograph is worth considerably more when you can see what was shot immediately before and after it.
It then went into a climate-controlled vault, because film degrades, and over fifteen thousand negatives have since been developed, digitised and indexed. Thousands remain unprinted, which means there is still material in those boxes that nobody living has seen.
In 1974 none of this was obvious. Somebody at that library looked at a defunct studio’s job files and understood what they were.
The unprinted thousands
Over fifteen thousand negatives have been developed, digitised and indexed. Thousands more have not.
That means there is material in those boxes that nobody alive has seen. Not lost, not destroyed, simply never printed, because printing costs money and staff time and somebody has to decide which frames are worth it.
For a researcher that is both frustrating and genuinely promising. If the thing you need is not in the digital index, it does not follow that the photograph does not exist. It may only mean nobody has had a reason to develop that frame yet.
Which is a question for the staff on the fourth floor, and another reason to go in person instead of concluding from a search result that the image was never taken.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Most places have no equivalent.
Photographic records of American cities in this period are usually fragmentary: a few newspaper images, some postcards, whatever families kept in shoeboxes. A complete commercial studio archive, bought whole, catalogued and kept in a vault, is rare. (See also what Pinellas holds on its own side of the bay)
It exists here because two brothers took every job that came through the door for forty-five years, and because somebody in 1974 recognised what the boxes were worth.
Everything in them was photographed for a reason that had nothing to do with posterity. Somebody wanted a picture of their new shop. The shop is gone. The picture is on the fourth floor.
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