Meet the Daily Worker and the Daily World Photographs Collection, close to 300 linear feet of photographic prints and negatives depicting notable figures and events in progressive political movements and popular culture of the last century. This collection consists of the photograph morgue of the Daily Worker and its successors including the Daily World and the People’s Daily World, the official newspapers of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), and it came to came to the Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive in 2006, as part of the records of the CPUSA.
In June 2009, Tamiment received a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to arrange and describe the collection. I was hired as Project Archivist in September, and with the help of a graduate archival assistant, completed a folder-level inventory of the collection and just recently began to process the collection.

What has become apparent to me after going through the collection folder-by-folder is that both its content and organization will be of value to future researchers. The photographs provide invaluable documentation of the history of the CPUSA and the American Left, as well striking images of famous historical figures and ordinary people. The collection also reveals the processes of radical visual culture and propaganda creation through traces of cropping and captioning left behind, and sheds light on the changing technologies of newspaper printing and dissemination of news service photographs. Although I am certain that researchers will be drawn to many of the images in the collection on an aesthetic level, examining the process of image-making at the Daily Worker/Daily World will no doubt prove an extremely fruitful avenue for research and scholarship as well.
The collection came to Tamiment divided into a Biographical and a Subject series, both arranged in roughly alphabetical order. The former series contains files related to individuals, both famous and obscure, while the Subject series contains folders with a set of subject headings devised by the staff of the Daily Worker. I’ll talk in more detail about each of these series as I process them. What’s clear at this point is that, although we don’t know precisely when it was created and/or revised, preserving the original order of this collection is essential.

You’ll be hearing more from me as the project progresses. There are a number of fascinating issues that have already presented themselves, and I’m sure more will arise as I get my hands dirty processing the collection.
As a final note, The collection is not available for research while it’s being processed, but we hope to have it ready for public access in the fall of 2011.