The first thing you notice in the basement of the massive fieldstone Poughkeepsie Journal building is the scale of it. Row after row of olive-green metal filing cabinets stretch into the distance, their shallow drawers packed tight with manila envelopes, negatives, contact sheets, and prints—decades’ worth of looking, recording, and filing. It is an industrial archive: systematic and heavy, a physical record of a time when a city was documented as a matter of routine.
This is the Journal’s photo archive, known in the trade as a photo “morgue,” which researchers estimate contains well over 200,000 images spanning much of the 20th century. For years it sat largely unnoticed in the building’s basement, until it nearly vanished. In 2019, as the newspaper’s corporate owner began fully moving operations out of the building, the entire collection—by then scattered across the basement—was suddenly in limbo. What saved it wasn’t a corporate preservation plan or a foundation grant, but a local intervention: the Poughkeepsie Public Library District stepped in, agreed to pay rent on a dedicated storage unit, and took on physical custodianship of the archive.
The arrangement is as fragile as it sounds. The library doesn’t own the archive. It can’t freely digitize it or put the images online. The intellectual property still belongs to Gannett, which acquired the Journal decades ago. And yet, standing amid the cabinets, it’s hard not to feel that whatever the legal paperwork says, this archive belongs, in spirit, to the people of Poughkeepsie.
That tension is at the heart of a growing local effort to think seriously about what the photo morgue is, what it’s for, and what it could become. Poughkeepsie residents Emilie Houssart and Kafui Attoh have spent the past year and a half immersed in the archive and its implications, culminating in an upcoming exhibition, “The Buried Image,” February 19-March 5 at Vassar’s Palmer Gallery, and a conference on March 7 at the Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts “Lessons from the Poughkeepsie Journal Photo Morgue: Empowering Communities to Preserve Their History” and the broader question of what happens to local history when newspapers collapse.
When the Record Outlives the Newsroom
Attoh, an associate professor of urban studies at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies first encountered the morgue while researching urban renewal in Poughkeepsie. He was looking for images—evidence of what had been lost—when he learned just how close the archive itself had come to disappearing. “It can’t just be Poughkeepsie,” he recalls thinking. “This is the newspaper industry collapsing, and nobody’s really paying attention to what’s left behind.”
Attoh is right. Across the country, as local newspapers shrink, sell their buildings, or shut down entirely, photo morgues are among the first casualties. Unlike published newspapers—now widely digitized—these backroom archives contain the unused images: the alternate shots, the unprinted moments, the photographs that didn’t fit the day’s layout but nonetheless recorded everyday life. They are difficult to monetize and expensive to maintain, which makes them easy to discard. How many have already been lost is unknown, in part because no national body tracks what happens to newspaper photo archives as newsrooms shrink or shut down.
Gannett’s relationship to the Poughkeepsie archive illustrates the problem. The company owns the rights and licenses images when asked, often for a few hundred dollars a use. But as Attoh discovered when he tried to publish one of the morgue’s photographs, the system barely functions. Gannett could quote a price, but couldn’t reliably locate or deliver the original high-quality print. The archive has value on paper, but little value in practice—at least from a corporate perspective.
That’s precisely why it matters locally.
“This stuff isn’t about iconic images,” Attoh says. “It’s about the visual texture of a place.” Sidewalk bookstalls. Factory floors. Parades, demolitions, classrooms, protests, church dinners. The kinds of scenes that rarely travel far from home, but define a city’s sense of itself.
Houssart, an artist and curator, came to the archive from a different angle. A printmaker by training, she was drawn not just to the photographs but to the material residue of the newspaper: the metal printing plates, some dating back to the 1930s and ’40s, others from the urban renewal years of the late 1960s and early ’70s. Plates commemorating Poughkeepsie’s 250th anniversary. Plates showing World War II warships docked on the Hudson. Plates that once carried the confident visual language of progress—new roads, cleared blocks—now read very differently.
“To hold these objects is to realize how much has already been decided for you,” Houssart says. “And how much context you’re missing if you don’t know what came before.”
To accompany the March conference, Attoh and co-organizer Jamie Kelly, a Vassar professor, asked Houssart and two other local artists—Onaje Benjamin and Xuewu Zheng—to respond to the archive not as illustrators of history but as interpreters of it. That encounter became the “The Buried Image.”
“People have a right to have these images,” says Houssart, who is reprinting some photographic plates from the archive for the exhibition. “And maybe having people be able to work with them and write with them and hold them, that will give people a relationship to the images of their own city in the past that they don’t have access to.”
That question of access keeps circling back to ownership. Newspapers have always occupied a peculiar space: private businesses that perform a public function. The Journal’s coverage of urban renewal, now visible in the archive, was hardly neutral—it often promoted demolition and redevelopment with an optimism that looks painfully naive in hindsight. And yet those very biases are part of the historical record. They tell us not just what happened, but how power was deployed at the time.
Custody Without Ownership
Who, then, has a right to these images? Legally, that answer is clear. Ethically, it’s murkier. And practically, it’s complicated by the realities of stewardship on the ground.
Kira Thompson, Head of Reference and Adult Services at the Poughkeepsie Public Library District, oversees the archive as it exists today. She traces the current arrangement back to 2019, when Gannett was preparing to vacate the Journal building. With no newsroom left in the space, the archive—long understood to be part of the newspaper’s internal infrastructure—suddenly had no institutional home.
“Several local people who knew it was down there started asking what was going to happen to it,” Thompson says. Local universities were approached, but declined. Ultimately, the public library stepped in. An agreement was reached with Gannett and the building’s owner: the materials were consolidated into a single storage unit; the library district began paying rent; and Gannett signed over custodianship, granting the library exclusive physical access while retaining intellectual property rights.
What that custodianship looks like, Thompson explains, is equal parts access and restraint. The library serves as the public’s point of contact for the archive, fielding requests from researchers, journalists, and residents. Library staff search the collection, scan images when possible, and facilitate limited use. But what they cannot do—at least not responsibly—is fully invest in the archive’s long-term care.
“We’re taxpayer funded,” Thompson says. “I don’t feel comfortable using library resources to any large extent on something we don’t own, that could be taken away from us.”
The constraints are not just financial but logistical. The archive’s finding aid consists of tens of thousands of handwritten index cards organized by subject alone. It was designed for internal newsroom use, by staff who knew instinctively how things had been filed. “If you don’t know how someone was thinking when they filed something, it can be very difficult to find,” Thompson says. The library has begun transcribing the finding aid to make it searchable—a modest but meaningful step toward access—but even that work is slow and incremental.
As a librarian, Thompson sees the collection less as a trove of notable images than as something rarer: a comprehensive visual record of a city over time. “This is 70 or 80 years of Poughkeepsie’s visual history that doesn’t really exist anywhere else,” she says. Unlike historical society collections, which are often donation-based and partial, a newspaper archive is systematic—a daily catalog of a place as it lived, changed, and argued with itself.
“That consistency is what makes it so important,” Thompson says. “And also why it’s frustrating. Its value is really to this community.”
For now, the archive exists in a kind of institutional limbo: protected from disposal, accessible in limited ways, but not fully cared for or shared at scale. It is saved, but not settled.
What It Takes to Make an Archive Public
Attoh points to other cities that have broken the stalemate. In Louisville, the photo archive of the Courier-Journal was donated to the University of Louisville, Kentucky, accompanied by funding for an archivist whose job was to make the collection usable. It took money, negotiation, and public pressure. But it worked.
The conference taking place on March 7 is meant to start that conversation here. Not just about this archive, but about why physical collections matter more than ever. In an era of AI-generated images and frictionless misinformation, Attoh argues, original photographic records take on new weight. They are harder to fake and rooted in place. They are, quite literally, ground truth.
That argument doesn’t require academic jargon to land. Anyone who has scrolled past a convincing fake image online understands the problem instinctively. The antidote isn’t better algorithms alone; it’s trusted physical records, stewarded with care, that anchor memory.
Back in the basement, the archive’s contradictions are everywhere. Careful labeling alongside dust and water stains. Filing systems reflecting the priorities of long-gone librarians. A space that tells its own story about what gets valued and what gets deferred.
It’s tempting to frame the photo morgue as a relic of a bygone media era. But that misses the point. What’s stored here isn’t journalism—it’s Poughkeepsie. The record of who lived here, worked here, argued here, and imagined a future here.
Gannett may own the images. But the history they preserve belongs to the city that made them. The question now is whether that history will remain locked in drawers, surviving on goodwill—or whether those who control it will allow it to be cared for and shared as the public record it already is.
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