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About the Collection
Burgert Brothers Collection of Tampa Photographs
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Burgert Brothers was Tampa’s leading commercial photographic firm from 1918 to the early 1960s. Established by brothers Al and Jean, the studio focused primarily on photographing the Tampa Bay area, including Ybor City, Port Tampa, Temple Terrace, and Ballast Point. The Burgert Brothers' photographs captured Tampa's development from small town to major city and include images of daily activities, festivals, churches, homes, businesses, and streets.
Special Collections holds 859 prints from Burgert Brothers negatives, all of which have been digitized and are available online. Click here for more information about the collection of prints and additional resources.
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Additional Resources
After the Burgert Brothers company closed in the 1960s, its negative files were stored in a tin-roofed garage for over a decade. Of the estimated 80,000 photographs that the company took, only about 40,000 survived in 1974 when the Hillsborough County Public Library acquired the collection. Due to years of exposure to heat and humidity, many of the negatives had deteriorated beyond salvage, and weeding of the damaged negatives reduced the collection to 18,000 negatives which are currently preserved at HCPL's John Germany Library in downtown Tampa.
USF’s Burgert collection consists of Burgert Brothers prints derived from various sources and assembled into a composite collection. The two principal sources for the Burgert images comprising the USF collection were the photographic holdings of the Tony Pizzo and Hampton Dunn collections. Both had considerable numbers of Burgert prints and, in some cases, negatives dispersed under various subject headings in their photograph files. Due to the significance of the Burgert Brothers firm in visually documenting Tampa’s past, USF special collections director Tom Kemp decided in 1993-94 to assemble all of the department’s Burgert images as a single, coherent collection rather than leaving the individual photographs dispersed in various locations. The pictures from each collection were labeled to record their provenance and then arranged by their Burgert serial numbers. Bibliographic access to the collection was originally through printed guides; all Burgert Brothers prints in USF Tampa Library Special & Digital Collections have been digitized and are available online.
As additional Burgert photographs have been discovered in other sources, they were added to the Burgert Collection. Preservation prints were made of the Burgert negatives from the Pizzo and Dunn collections as the original negatives were in the process of decomposition due to “vinegar disease.” Although many of the photographs comprising the USF Burgert Brothers Collection are represented in the Burgert Archive at HCPL, a significant number are not.
For a definitive history of the Burgert Brothers, see Robert Snyder and Jack Moore's Pioneer Commercial Photography: The Burgert Brothers, Tampa, Florida. The volume is available in USF's Special Collections as well as the circulating collections at the Tampa Library and the Nelson Poynter Library in St. Petersburg.
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