Collections Spotlight: Wurts Brothers Photography

The National Building Museum acquired the Wurts Brothers Photography Collection in 1983, making it one of many Museum’s earliest collections. At that point, the Museum had solely just lately been established by an Act of Congress, and the Museum wouldn’t open to the general public for 2 extra years. Even in these formative levels, pictures was an necessary accumulating precedence for the Museum to showcase the constructing arts. This emphasis displays the lengthy relationship between pictures and structure, as a few of the earliest surviving images on the planet depict the constructed atmosphere.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a French pioneer usually credited as a forefather of architectural pictures, exemplifies this connection. Around 1827, he created a pewter plate heliograph from his second-story window, capturing the encircling buildings and rooftops. This picture is acknowledged because the oldest identified everlasting photographic print.

Continuing this custom nearly seventy years later, brothers Norman and Lionel Wurts established a pictures studio in New York City in 1894. They used large-format glass plate negatives to seize their environment and developed constructive prints for architects, builders, contractors, and producers within the space. Norman was the photographer within the household, whereas Lionel took on the studio work and accountability for managing the enterprise.

In the Twenties, a second era took up the household enterprise, and Lionel’s son Richard joined his uncle behind the lens. Over the subsequent a number of a long time, the Wurts Brothers traded fragile and heavy glass plates for plastic-supported negatives, which had been extra handy and simpler to make use of. Alongside the event of pictures as a medium, the Wurts Brothers additionally experimented with prints, testing a wide range of strategies to provide a picture. Below, see three completely different variations of the identical picture:

Richard Wurts expanded the enterprise past the industrial wants of New York’s rising constructing trade, ultimately shifting the studio to Connecticut. Throughout the twentieth century, Richard traveled the nation for a nationwide clientele, together with Cass Gilbert, Otis Elevator, and Alcoa, documenting traits and developments within the constructed atmosphere all through the nation and, ultimately, the world.

Though primarily documentary in nature, the corporate’s pictures garnered widespread attraction and had been commissioned for circulation in magazines, print ads, promotional brochures, and postcards. These pictures helped form well-liked perceptions about modern structure proper up till Richard shuttered the enterprise in 1979.

When it was time to maneuver their enterprise archive to a brand new residence, Richard and his spouse Geraldine break up the gathering into two items. All pictures regarding the 5 boroughs of New York City had been donated to the Museum of the City of New York, whereas the National Building Museum obtained every little thing else. Both collections are digitized and accessible on-line. The Museum’s Wurts Brothers assortment totals practically 27,000 gadgets, together with paper prints, polyester negatives, glass negatives, and transparencies, in addition to supplies from the Wurts Brothers’ enterprise archive, resembling notes, receipts, brochures, ads, maps, and different ephemera.

To conduct analysis utilizing the Wurts Brothers Photography Collection, please fill out a Research Request Form. You can study extra about different collections held on the Museum by looking the web database here!