Picturing Michigan's Past

About the Project
The David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography at the William L. Clements Library consists of over 100,000 images, primarily made up of photographs of everyday life in Michigan taken by both professional and amateur photographers from the 1840s into the mid-twentieth century. The entire collection consists of photos in a variety of formats (daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes de visite, cabinet photographs, stereographs, and mounted and unmounted paper prints) but more than half of the images (around 60,000) are real-photo postcards (RPPCs) depicting almost every aspect of life in every county in Michigan from the early 1900s to the late 1950s. Currently, the collection is only partially open for research. A small selection of the photographs is digitally available, but the vast majority of the materials have to be consulted in person.

Our project makes the real-photo postcards in the collection—and the many revealing snapshots they offer of life in Michigan—digitally available to researchers and the general public, fully searchable and sortable by location (city and county) and descriptive categories. We are completing a massive digitization of all the RPPCs and now need your help describing the content of the images so that users can discover these materials. This initial project is meant to collect information that will make the images generally browsable by subject, but a second phase of the project will focus on additional information such as transcription of handwritten messages and addresses. We will upload batches of images to this project as they are completed by region, beginning with the Upper Peninsula and Northern Michigan, then continuing with Central/Mid-Michigan, Western Michigan, and Southeastern Michigan. Zooniverse researchers will be asked to transcribe the title, the photographer and date, and categorize the content of the image.

The collection is obviously a rich resource for research into the local histories of Michigan, and we also believe the collection has resources for the study of specific events and subjects pertinent to American history more broadly. This vast pool of visual information will provide exceptional resources for the study of agriculture, mining, lumbering, manufacturing, urban and suburban culture, portraiture, domestic life, leisure, travel, and transportation, among many other topics. As such it offers evidence for the study of broader themes, such as the transformations caused by the exploitation of natural resources, the industrialization of American cities and occupations, changes in fashion and dress, racial and cultural identity, the role of fraternal organizations in society, and the uses of photography in business, domestic, and social life. Help us present this rare glimpse into American life to the world!

After the Zooniverse project is complete, library staff will compile and review the results, filling in any missing information such as titles or dates. Once this work is done, we will create a new digital collection for the Tinder postcards, making them freely available and searchable from the library website.

Content Warning
The collection does not always present an idyllic and utopian picture of life in Michigan. Some of the images in the collection contain problematic and disturbing content. In particular, the collection contains racist depictions of people of color, particularly Indigenous Americans. Real-photo postcards were part of a racist cultural system that often treated BIPOC bodies as “oddities” to be collected. We unequivocally rebuke the use of these images for any such purpose, and Clements staff are doing our best to pre-screen and remove particularly troubling images. Volunteers can also report any objectionable postcards that they happen to encounter, which will be automatically removed from the project and carefully reviewed by library staff. Offensive images may be screened out of the public digital collection but will be retained for research purposes.

We should, however, also not erase the experiences of marginalized communities on which these materials shed light. Our goal instead is to make these images accessible so that they can be researched and taught from a variety of perspectives. Intolerance and oppression often work through visual media to magnify their power. Gaining a better understanding of how this functioned in the past can help us more clearly recognize its ongoing impact today.