SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - About 171,000 photos shot by The Salt Lake Tribune from the 1930s to the 1960s are now accessible on a state history website.
The collection includes a young Hank Aaron in Salt Lake City and President John F. Kennedy in Utah about two months before his assassination, the newspaper reported (https://bit.ly/2m5ldc7 ).
“We’re really proud of this,” said Heidi Tak, a digital librarian with the Utah Division of State History. “It’s the largest we’ve ever digitized, and it brought our photo collection to over 250,000.”
Backstage Library Works, University of Utah’s Marriott Library and Southern Utah University started scanning negatives in late 2015, she said.
The digitized collection was made public this month, but it has been with the state History Library since the 1980s.
“They were in the Tribune photo morgue and they were going to be getting rid of them. But someone there asked if we wanted them,” Tak said. “We said yes, and we put them in individual envelopes inside boxes and shelved them.”
Previously, the division’s collection mostly featured posed photos.
“But with these, it’s breaking news - images like a train derailment in Bingham Canyon and people rummaging through the rubble,” she said. “These are live action images you just wouldn’t see in most historic collections.”
Anyone with information on who is in some of the photos can contact the state history division, Tak said.
“This makes it easy for everybody to learn about the state and the people here,” said Jeremy Harmon, The Tribune’s director of photography. “It’s been fascinating to see all the different faces. One of my favorite photos is of a family of coal miners in Price … Also the hundreds of photos from the old Hotel Utah, the guests and bellhops and wait staff. It’s really interesting to see how people worked and lived.”
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Information from: The Salt Lake Tribune, https://www.sltrib.com
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