The Library Company of Philadelphia’s Jennings Photograph Collection was acquired in two accessions, one in 1978 and the other in 1981. The collection is comprised of more than 1400 eight-by-ten inch negatives and prints that illustrate the Philadelphia region in the late 19th and early 20th-centuries. The Jennings Photograph Collection records Philadelphia’s architectural and technological progress in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His photographs provide a modern image of Philadelphia that counter the city’s reputation as a “quaint maze of ancient brick and cobblestones.” Railroad stations, construction sites and streetviews in and around the Philadelphia region appear repeatedly along with new building forms, especially the new steel and masonry towers hovering over the old rows in downtown Philadelphia. In the early twentieth century, Jennings free-lanced for several newspapers, including the North American, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Leslie’s Weekly and opened a small photographic studio taking post card photographs of Willow Grove Park and Philadelphia events, such as the Sesquicentennial celebration in 1926.
Curated by Linda Wisniewski.
