Gary D. Saretzky Collection on Nineteenth-Century New Jersey Photographers

Dates

c. 1998-2019

Scope and Contents

Collected source materials documenting the photographic activities and lives of amateur and professional photographers, both men and women, who were active in New Jersey before the twentieth century, together with information on persons in nineteenth-century New Jersey who engaged in allied pursuits such as the manufacture or sale of photographic supplies. Information on New Jersey camera clubs is also included, as is some data on the specific photographic formats (portraits and/or landscapes, including stereoscopic images) and the exact photographic types (especially daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes and/or albumen prints) created by the photographers who are documented. Cities represented heavily in the files include Camden, Elizabeth, Jersey City, Hoboken, Newark, Paterson and Trenton.

Extent

4 Cubic Feet (6 manuscript boxes and 4 half-sized manuscript boxes)

Physical Location

These materials are currently housed off-site. When requesting to see this collection, please note that it may take up to a week to retrieve the materials.

Language of Materials

English

Additional Description

Biographical / Historical

Gary Saretzky is an archivist, photographer and educator who has researched and written about historical photographers and the images they produced.

Arrangement

The collection is arranged alphabetically, though each of the seven accessions that comprise the collection begins a new alphabetic order. As such, most boxes begin at the start of the alphabet (A or B) as many of the accessions are contained in a single box.

File Plan

Organized into three sequences: files on sources; files on individual photographers; and city and county files. Interfiled in one alphabet, with some headings subdivided by a photographer's name.

General

The collection consists of handwritten notes, lecture texts, excerpts from a database of New Jersey photographers, letters, printouts of electronic mail, reproductions of nineteenth-century documents from the state of New Jersey (including marriage, death and probate records) and the federal government (including census records and patents), printouts of selected web pages, copies of biographies and obituaries, excerpts from genealogical compilations and databases, city and business directory information, reproductions of photographers' advertisements, clippings and copies from newspapers and magazines, information on photographers that was written or compiled by other researchers, lists of photographs held by selected institutions, announcements and handouts for exhibits of historical photographs, and copies of nineteenth-century photographs and their printed backs. The lecture texts, 2006-2008, pertain to presentations on early photographers active in the New Jersey counties of Morris, Gloucester, Ocean and Hudson. In addition to librarians and archivists, the correspondents include local historians, photo historians, photograph collectors and photographers' descendants. Among the several original nineteenth-century documents in the collection is an 1892 Pach Bros. invoice.