Cased Photograph Collection Now Online

Thanks to a grant received from the Abington Foundation and the Ed Lee and Jean Campe Foundation, the Library Company digitized its entire cased photograph collection and is making it available to the public on ImPAC, our digital collections catalog. Users will find daguerreotypes, the earliest photographic process, heavily represented in this collection, as well as ambrotypes and tintypes. The collection primarily consists of portraits but also includes what is considered to be Philadelphia’s earliest “news” photograph showing a crowd gathered around the First Bank of the United States, capturing a scene during the anti-Catholic riots of 1844 (pictured). Many of the cased photographs were used in our recent exhibition Catching A Shadow: Daguerreotypes in Philadelphia, 1839-1860. The Cased Photograph Collection is also accessible online.