The Poughkeepsie Journal’s Photo ‘Morgue’ Holds Hudson Valley History. Now a Community Is Trying to Save It.

An estimated 200,000 images—many of them accompanied by news articles chronicling life in the region from the late 1930s to the year 2000—were rescued before they were discarded under a stewardship agreement between the materials’ owner, Gannett, and the Poughkeepsie Public Library District.

On March 7, about 70 local residents gathered at The Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts to ponder the future of the photos and documents in what newspaper people commonly call “the morgue.”

Fittingly, the conference kicked off with a talk by Margaretta “Meg” Downey, a former executive editor at the Poughkeepsie Journal and an award-winning journalist with more than 40 years in the newspaper business. “I want to tell you why a morgue matters,” Downey told those gathered for the event, the latest in a series of Signature Programs hosted by Vassar faculty, administrators, and others. This program, titled “Lessons from the Poughkeepsie Journal Photo Morgue: Empowering Communities to Preserve Their Visual Histories,” was hosted by Jamie Kelly, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vassar, and Kafui Attoh, Associate Professor of Urban Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Labor and Urban Studies.

In her remarks, Downey said morgues are a treasure trove of information not only about the major events that happened here—a visit in 1995 by U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Historic Site in Hyde Park or a speech in Poughkeepsie delivered by civil rights activist James Meredith days after the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—but also slices of everyday life in the region such as wedding announcements, wins and losses of local sports teams, or the simple kindness of a firefighter rescuing a kitten from a burning building.

Downey said these priceless photos and news articles were saved from oblivion under an agreement negotiated in 2019 by Gannett and the Poughkeepsie Public Library District. Before this deal was reached, Downey, retired Court of Appeals Judge Albert Rosenblatt, Library Director Tom Lawrence and others in the community had been searching for some time for some entity to take custody of the morgue. “We got a lot of ‘No’s’ until the Library District stepped in,” she said.

Under the terms of the agreement, Gannett retains ownership of the material while the Library District is empowered to ensure all of the photos and news articles are preserved. During the conference, Kira Thompson, the Library District employee in charge of preserving the material in the morgue, explained what she and others at the library, as well as some volunteers, have been doing to rescue and catalog the images and articles. Thompson, currently Head of Adult Services for the Library District, was serving as its Historian when the project was undertaken in 2020. “Some boxes of material still have not been sorted, some have water damage, and some photo plates are stuck together,” she said. “It’s far from a tidy operation.”

Thompson said some of the drawers in the filing cabinets were completely empty when she first began her work. For example, a drawer purportedly containing all of the photos and articles on Timothy Leary, a controversial member of 1960s counterculture and an advocate of the use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, was missing when the project began, she said. “It was later found, and we are fortunate to have it back,” Thompson said.

So how does this stewardship agreement with Gannett Corp. enable these images and news articles to be preserved, and what are the limitations on what can be done with them? That question was addressed by Frank D. LoMonte, Legal Counsel at Cable News Network (CNN) and adjunct professor at the University of Georgia School of Law. LoMonte was contacted by the conveners of the conference after they read a paper he had co-authored with University of Florida law student Lila Greenberg titled “Photographic Memory: Expanding News Deserts that Threaten to Erase a Visual Record of Contemporary American History.”

LoMonte noted that the issues surrounding how to preserve the materials in the Poughkeepsie Journal morgue are being confronted in communities throughout the country as more and more newspapers go out of business or leave their morgues behind when they abandon their newsrooms. He said approximately one-third of all counties in the United States are not served by any local newspapers, and these “news deserts” are also “history deserts.”

LoMonte said there is evidence indicating that a community without a newspaper that prints the facts about day-to-day life “leads to partisanship where only opinions are seen on social media. No one with boots on the ground is printing the truth.”

He said conflicting components of U.S. copyright law often have made it difficult for entities like the Poughkeepsie Public Library District to know exactly what they can and cannot do with the material they are preserving. “The threat of being sued by those who own these files is problematic,” LoMonte said. “We need a lot more clarity on this issue, but hats off to Gannett for at least letting the Poughkeepsie Library District preserve this material. The goal is to gather the material first, then sort out the legal ramifications later.”

Prior to the event, three artists—Emilie Houssart, Onaje Benjamin, and Xuewu Zheng—used photos and articles from the morgue to create an exhibit at the Palmer Gallery titled The Buried Image. Portions of this exhibit were on display at The Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts during the Signature Program event. (Full bios of the artists are available on the “Lessons From the Poughkeepsie Journal Photo Morgue” webpage.)

Library District Director Tom Lawrence said he was grateful to all who had taken part in the Signature Program. “This conference was a start of the conversation,” Lawrence said. “It was rewarding to see so many people who were interested enough to gather here.”

The conveners of the program agreed. “One of our main goals with the conference was to draw attention to the Poughkeepsie Journal photo morgue, and to help clarify the challenges facing photo morgues across the country,” Kelly said.

Attoh said he hoped that drawing attention to what is happening in Poughkeepsie might help those in other communities find ways to preserve their own histories. “Our goal was to draw attention to this issue with respect to the Poughkeepsie Journal morgue and others like it and to work together on solutions that we can share with people in other communities,” he said. “I think we made some progress.”