Al and Jean Burgert opened a commercial photography studio in Tampa around 1917.
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.
This collection moves me, and the reason is how fast a city forgets itself. The Burgerts took the paying jobs for reasons that had nothing to do with posterity, and in doing so they kept an entire era from disappearing. People who sneer at commercial work as mere hackwork should spend an hour with this archive.
What is in the Burgert Brothers 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, digitized 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 isn’t something you experience on a screen. You have to stand in front of it and walk along it.
What it shows
The subject range makes it useful, and it’s 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. Researchers care most about the ordinary life: people at the beach, people playing golf, tennis, shuffleboard and checkers, and local celebrations. It’s 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.
That accident is what I prize most about commercial photography. The client paid for a storefront and got a record of the whole street thrown in for free. I prefer one of these job photos to a staged portrait any day.
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 decision matters. 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.
Whoever made that call deserves a statue. A budget committee looking at boxes of negatives from a defunct studio would’ve seen a waste of money, and somebody at that library had the nerve to buy them anyway. Every writer and family historian in this region owes that person a debt.
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. That’s 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. That means there are no seams and no software guesses. What the camera swept past is what’s 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 traveled the scene, and the far ends were photographed seconds apart. That occasionally produces oddities where somebody moved during the sweep. A five-foot photograph of Tampa in the 1920s can’t be experienced on a screen, and that’s the single best argument for making the trip to the fourth floor instead of working from the digital index.
The panoramas alone justify the drive downtown, in my view. Software stitching has made wide images cheap and a little dishonest, and a Cirkut print is the opposite: one sweep of film, with the oddities left in wherever somebody moved.
What was happening while they photographed it
The value of the archive is partly the period it spans. That 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.
The people building the thing hired a commercial photographer throughout all of it. 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’ve 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 outweighs 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’s a community at leisure, in the clothes they wore, standing in front of buildings that in most cases are gone.
How can a writer use the Burgert Brothers photographs?
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 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 neighborhood or a business that no longer exists, this is often the only surviving image. And light. Photographs from a single 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. Setting is where historical fiction most often falls apart, and the failure is always careless. Writers research the big events and then guess at the street, and readers who know the place can smell the guess on the first page. These photographs take the excuse away. For the Ybor material, I’ve 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, tone 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. That means the buildings either side were captured incidentally and without any attempt to flatter them. Those neighbors are often the only surviving image of themselves.
Next, the ground. Paving, kerbs, tracks, mud, drainage. Whether the street was surfaced tells you what year you’re looking at more reliably than the cars do, and it’s my favorite trick in the whole archive, because nobody staged the mud.
Setting is where historical fiction most often falls apart, and the failure is always careless.
After that, 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 really used. Also look at 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’s 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.
I’d drill this habit into every researcher if I could, because the edges of a photograph hold the information nobody bothered to stage, and most people never look at them.
Before you drive over
Start online, because more than fifteen thousand of these images are digitized 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. That isn’t always what you’d call it, and researchers who search one exact street name, get nothing and quit are giving up too soon. Street names change, neighborhoods get renamed, and businesses are filed under owner names you don’t 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 real difficulty, and it’s a miserable one. Plan for a garage and a walk, or use the bus. That serves the building on several routes.
And ask at the desk. Staff who work with a collection daily know what’s in it in ways no index captures. That’s the same argument that applies to every reference desk in this county.
How do you see the Burgert Brothers collection?
Start online. Search the library’s digital index and see whether what you need is among the fifteen thousand already digitized. 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’re making the trip for photographs, the family records are in the same room.
Downtown Tampa parking is the real difficulty. Plan for a garage, or use the bus. That serves the building on several routes.
What happens to archives nobody buys
The 1974 purchase is the reason any of this exists. The alternative is plain enough. 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 only decoration.
That paragraph horrifies me. I’d bet most American cities lost a studio archive this way at some point, into a dumpster or a dealer’s bin, with nobody noticing because nobody knew what it was. Tampa got lucky, and I wish more cities had been paying that kind of attention.
The Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library bought the collection in its entirety. That’s 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, digitized and indexed. Thousands remain unprinted. That means there’s 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, digitized and indexed. Thousands more haven’t. That means there’s 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’s both frustrating and promising. If the thing you need isn’t in the digital index, it doesn’t follow that the photograph doesn’t 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.
My take
Tampa got lucky in 1974. Most studio archives get scattered into a dealer’s bin or a dumpster, and a photo with no date or address is only decoration. The library bought this one whole, so the sequence and the job numbers survive. If you write about this region in that period, go in person. Thousands of negatives are still unprinted, so a missing index entry can still have a photograph behind it. Ask the staff on the fourth floor.
Why this matters
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 recognized what the boxes were worth.
The photographers shot everything in them for a reason that had nothing to do with posterity. Somebody wanted a picture of their new shop, and the shop is gone while the picture sits on the fourth floor. A writer who covers this region without going to look at it is guessing at a city somebody already recorded. That’s lazy, and it throws away a gift most places never got.
