Historic and Contemporary Photograph Collections

Special Collections & University Archives
Knight Library, 2nd Floor North
15th & Kincaid Street
University of Oregon

Special Collections contains approximately half a million photographic images in its collections. Most photograph collections are not listed in the UO Libraries' online catalog, and many relate to manuscript collections. Inventories are being compiled and converted to electronic format. Our greatest strengths are images prior to the 1940s. Please contact us if you are looking for a particular image.

See Finding Primary Source Materials

The full list of photograph collections in Special Collections.

Other significant photo collections in Oregon: Oregon Historical Society, Salem Public Library, Archives of Oregon State University.

Selected Historic Collections

Clarence Andrews: Prints, albums and negatives from Alaska (1890s-1900s), 1,200 images.
Roy Andrews: Albums and negatives depicting schools in Lane County, Oregon (1911-1912), 220 images.
Album Collection: Artificial collection of individual albums of travel, family, logging, and campus life.
Angelus Studio: Prints and negatives depicting scenes and events in the Portland area (1870s-1930s), 10,000 images.
William H. Burton: 549 negatives and 2 albums of University of Oregon, Newport coast, and New York City, 1912-1915.
Brice P. Disque: Spruce Production operations of 1917.
June D. Drake: 28 vintage prints, c. 1905-1915.
Eugene Print Collection: 200 historic images of the Eugene vicinity.
James T. Gray: Prints and negatives, of Alaska and Oregon rivers (1902-1912), 250 images.
Joseph Lane: Vintage images related to the Oregon governor (1850s-1903), 8 images.
Print Collection: 8,000 vintage prints assembled from a variety of sources. Subjects include architecture; local history; landscape; logging, shipping and railroads; and portraits.
William J. Smith: Images, mostly stereo, of the town of Detroit, Oregon, and logging operations (1898-1983), 67 images.
Doris Ulmann: Vintage prints, proof prints and glass-plate negatives featuring portraits of eminent literary figures, craftspeople and farmers from Appalachia and the Georgia Sea Islands (1920s-1934), 9,000 images.
Gertrude Bass Warner: approximately 5,500 hand-tinted lantern slides of art and culture of China, Japan, Korea and Cambodia from 1904 to 1929.

Pendleton Group

Images from Umatilla and the Pendleton area, c.1880-1957. Includes the Pendleton Roundup and many images of local tribes.

Walter S. Bowman (1865-1938): Bowman was a professional photographer noted for his images of Pendleton and the local tribes. Bowman images are found in many of the collections.
Lee Drake (1882-1957): Drake was a newspaper man, a civic booster, and active in preservation of historic materials. He collected photos and was an amateur photographer. He was instrumental in building the Pendleton Group collections at the University of Oregon. His collection is most valuable for its historic images, and for his documentation of Round-Up in the 1940s and 1950s.
The Electric Studio/O.G. Allen: ca. 1911-1913. The Electric Studio was a franchise. Allen was official photographer for the Roundup. Allen images exist in other Pendleton Group collections.
Charles W. Furlong (1874-1967): was an explorer, adventurer, writer and scientist who documented his adventures in publications and notebooks and well as in photographs. The Furlong photographs include copies of his artwork, ethnographical evidence, historical events and personalities, and remote corners of the world. He was a competitor and chronicler for the Pendleton Round-Up, and helped establish the mythology of the American West.
Major Lee Moorhouse: Glass plate negatives depicting peoples, scenes, and events of Eastern Oregon (1897-1920), 6,300 images.
Park Weed Willis. Willis was the brother-in-law of Moorhouse, and an amateur historian. His collection includes a small number of vintage Moorhouse prints and Moorhouse family photos.
The Print Collection includes 56 images by Bowman, Doubleday, Rutter, and Moorhouse.

Contemporary Collections

The Library also collects contemporary photographers, primarily those documenting ecological change and the conflict between man and nature, and alternative communities. Recent acquisitions include works by Gregory Gorfkle, Robbie McClaran, Dan Powell, and Bernard Freemesser.

Abbreviations: GPN stands for glass plate negative. GSP stands for gelatin silver print.

Maintained by: N. Helmer, spcarref@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 12/05/2007