Capturing the City: Photographs from the Streets of St. Louis, 1900–1930 by Joseph Heathcott and Angela Dietz (review)

A municipal photography archive documents the ebb and flow of a city, the cyclical repetition of improvement and corrosion, continued governmental efforts to stem the inevitable human wear on a public space. Examined closely, municipal photography collections reflect far more than a series of civic improvements. These archives evoke a city's self-image, its issues, and its aspirations.

In Capturing the City: Photographs from the Streets of St. Louis, 1900–1930, Joseph Heathcott and Angela Dietz bring the dazzling photographs of a lost municipal archive to light. The book includes reproductions of 280 four-inch-by-five-inch glass plates created by Charles Holt and his photography division between 1900 and 1930 for the St. Louis Board of Public Works. Under the auspices of the city, Holt's photography team documented thousands of municipal projects for a number of city agencies including the Department of Sewers, Department of Harbors and Wharfs, Department of Streets, and the city's legal department, all according to need. At its height, Holt's division maintained an active file of over 18,000 images.

In most instances, the photographers behind the efforts to document the municipal underpinnings of a complex urban system remain anonymous. The unique viewpoint of the person behind the lens is subsumed by the intention to create a standardized method of recording progress. Within the pages of Capturing the City, Holt's frames transcend the context of the amassed archive, allowing a vivid prism into St. Louis' past.

The book is divided into five thematic sections: City Life, Advertising and Store-fronts, Children, Labor, and Transportation. Heathcott and Dietz frame the photographs in an elegant essay that provides contextual history of the city of St. Louis as well as the contemporaneous visual culture that Charles Holt worked within, including local social reform and commercial studio practices. The authors also relay the incredible story of how the photographs were narrowly saved from destruction, following their odyssey from city hall to their permanent home in the William Swekosky Collection at the Missouri Historical Society.

There are a number of themes at play within Capturing the City. The authors primarily explore the subjects that slip almost accidentally into the frames, describing the "silver slivers of urban experience, chance captures of crystalline moments" that flash between the "dry views of public works" (6). Indeed, Heathcott and Dietz describe the overarching photographic collection as "a kind of drone of the urban mundane, almost sublime in its ordinariness" (38). The majority of the collection's photographs do not depict the grand gestures of a city but rather record "the difficult daily slog to upgrade the city—block by block, sewer pipe by sewer pipe, brick paver by brick paver" (26). Synthesized within the collection, these images were intended to provide a durable record of the advancement of public works, proof of that work necessary to the city's infrastructure.

Although Heathcott and Dietz contextualize the images amassed within the original archive, their focus is on the individual images that can stand alone, the idiosyncratic frames that transcend the rest of the collection. The authors selected images that could be classified as "street photography," exhibiting the plates that Holt and his team could not help but take, even if they did not fit into the schema of the archive. These shots transcend the rest of the amassed collection. A sign announces the upcoming institution of Prohibition, advertising the slogan "Bone Dry Forever" on the corner of Twelfth and Olive (109). Men dressed in threadbare suits scavenge in garbage heaps south of Municipal Free Bridge (now MacArthur Bridge) (214). A boy dressed as a cowboy draws his toy gun from its holster (187). None of these colorful subjects were assigned, but because of Holt's wandering lens the collection is far richer...