The Courier Journal – winner of 11 Pulitzer Prizes throughout its 154-year history – and its parent company Gannett have transferred its library of photographs and negatives to UofL Archives and Special Collections.

Members of Louisville’s Bingham family, which owned the newspaper from 1918 to 1986, have made a separate donation to support the collection, including preserving it, preparing it for use by the public, and developing programming to enable the public to engage with it.

Their combined generosity is creating the Barry Bingham Jr. Courier-Journal Photo Collection, announced UofL Interim President Lori Stewart Gonzalez. The unique journalistic collection is of local, state and national importance.

“We are incredibly grateful to the Courier Journal, Gannett, Emily Bingham, Molly Bingham and the rest of the Bingham family for making this historic gift possible,” Gonzalez said. “Generations of readers saw these photos in their daily newspaper each morning, and now, future generations will continue to be able to study and appreciate the insight they provide into the history of our city, state, nation and world.”

“This gift will allow the Courier Journal to retain the legacy of our work through this collection of historic photographs,” said Courier Journal Editor Mary Irby-Jones. “It is important for us to preserve and share our work with others so our community can learn about the history of Louisville as captured through our photographers in the field for more than 150 years. The Courier Journal is honored to entrust this priceless archive to the care of the University of Louisville for the purpose of making the collection available to the community for research and scholarship.”

“For most of a decade, it has been our dream to honor our father by finding a permanent, public home for the Courier Journal’s photographic collection,” Emily and Molly Bingham said in a joint statement. “This visual treasure is a testament to his dedication to high quality journalism, his passion for photography, his love of archives and his commitment to public access to information. He is up there somewhere today, smiling and joyfully twirling his trademark handlebar mustache.”

About the Barry Bingham Jr. Courier-Journal Photo Collection

The collection, consisting of images created by the photo department that served both the Courier Journal and the afternoon Louisville Times newspapers, chronicles daily happenings and major events from approximately the mid-1930s to the early 2000s when digital photography began to replace the use of film to capture images. The collection doubles the size of UofL’s photo holdings. It might have dated back further, but the Great Flood of 1937 destroyed much of the newspaper’s photo and negative library.

“The collection chronicles the civil rights movement, World War II, the Kentucky Derby through the years, presidential visits, changes in the built environment, and numerous public appearances and behind-the-scenes images of world leaders and celebrities,” said Archives and Special Collections Director Carrie Daniels. “Basically, all of the changes happening within our country were captured in these photographs.”

“It’s an incredible collection,” Elizabeth Reilly, photo archivist, said, “and with any large-scale acquisition like this, it will take years to process, organize and add information to the collection, to make images discoverable and usable by the public.

“A small portion of the collection will be available online, and, as we process the amazing imagery it contains, we will be opening up bigger and bigger parts of the collection to the public, making it accessible to everyone who wants to see it.”

Reilly credited Barry Bingham Jr., the third and last Bingham family member to serve as the paper’s publisher, for his devotion to setting high standards for the photography his newspaper published. The Courier Journal won two Pulitzer Prizes for photojournalism during his tenure.

“He was a huge supporter of high-quality photojournalism,” Reilly said. “He grew and improved the quality of photography in the newspaper through investments, hiring talented photojournalists, and giving them time and travel budget to capture visual information beyond the news moment or press release. That commitment to quality is reflected in the collection and adds to its national significance.”

Daniels cited the increase in scholarship and creative potential that the collection will bring to UofL.

“Our Photographic Archives already contain 2-to-3 million historical, documentary and fine art images dating from the 19^th century to today that capture faces, buildings, landscapes and events from around the world, with a focus on Louisville and Kentucky. These images have appeared in scholarly or artistic work, including filmmaker Ken Burns’ documentaries, Dustbowl, Prohibition and Baseball. This dramatically increases our ability to provide images that everyone, including scholars and artists, will be able to use going forward, and we are very excited about that,” she said.

Note: Forty images from the collection have now been digitized and are .

During World War II, the university was part of the V-12 program, which not only infused UofL with students, but also enabled the university to build its first dorms to accommodate them.  

A fire destroyed a student cafeteria in 1951, shifting a centralized socializing spot to a former Navy V-12 mess hall, where it stayed until 1959.

The floods of 1937 and 2009 affected a majority of the Louisville community, including UofL’s campuses. In 2009, UofL closed many of Belknap buildings for repair and moved employees into alternative locations, like trailers, to work.  

Nothing, however, comes close to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In mid-March, much of the university – from classes to business operations and everything in between – shifted entirely online as part of a statewide stay-at-home mandate.

Not only were operations upended, so too were basic milestones. The Class of 2020 never got to walk across the stage at the Yum! Center. Internships abruptly ended. UofL Basketball never experienced the madness of March.

And so forth.

How do you possibly explain this unprecedented experience for posterity? UofL’s Archives and Special Collections and the are trying to do just that with their requests for the UofL community’s experiences and reflections of life during the pandemic.

Archives and Special Collections started its call to action in late March and continues to seek submissions. According to Carrie Daniels, university archivist and director, the idea behind launching this collection was built on experience from past disruptions (namely, the floods of 1937 and 2009), and by benchmarking other universities, like UNC Charlotte and Harvard, doing similar projects.

“We knew that in the future, community members and historians in general would want to know about people’s experiences at this time. Collections like this also serve as a centerpiece for remembering,” she said. “The materials can provide a sort of touchstone for people to remember and process their own stories, or to recount and make sense of family stories that have come down from previous generations.”

These types of hand-me-down recounts have happened frequently with the flood of 1937, in particular, she said. By the time of the 2009 flood, many materials moved to a digital format, which creates a different experience for posterity. This disparity informed Archives and Special Collections on how to approach its COVID-19 collection.

“For the flood of 1937, we are still getting donations of photographs taken, diaries kept and newspapers clipped. Digital files are not as hardy,” Daniels said. “Photographs and video taken with cell phones, blog posts and the like can be very ephemeral. We have all had the experience of corrupted digital files we can’t open, or photos that don’t get transferred onto a new device. So we really wanted to be proactive, asking people to donate materials while events were still unfolding, or to consciously preserve and hold on to them to donate later.”

Still, the department is collecting any format – photos, videos, textual documents like diaries, audio files, art, name it.

“People document and process experiences in a variety of ways, and we didn’t want to place restrictions on what we would accept,” Daniels said.

So far, the themes that have emerged from submissions have largely resonated with what “our own” feelings have been through this moment, she said. The department has received images of empty grocery store shelves and an empty campus, for example.    

The project is ongoing, since events are still unfolding. Right now, the plan is to collect and preserve the material, then open it up to the public based on permissions from donors.

Simultaneously, UofL is also serving as a preservation and access partner for the Frazier Museum for a similar project. The museum began reaching out to the community around the same time the university launched its call to action. UofL is providing digital preservation expertise and access to digital and analog content for the long term. Daniels said there is a plan to partner on an exhibit eventually, but adds any such event “will have to wait until the community is healed enough, when there is enough distance that we can reflect, and not resurface trauma.”

From her unique perspective, Daniels said this experience feels more like the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, than it does, for example, the floods of 1937 or 2009.

“With the floods, the waters soon receded and we got on with the very positive task of rebuilding,” she said. “The period of time where people’s lives were threatened was, in relation to the current pandemic, rather brief.”

Conversely, like Sept. 11, the pandemic has changed the way we interact with each other and the world.

“We are part of the world and are not immune – literally – to the things that plague the rest of the world,” she said. “A sense of safety has been lost, maybe irretrievably.”