Capturing the City: Photographs from the Streets of St. Louis, 1900 - 1930

Joseph Heathcott is a writer, curator, and educator based in New York City where he teaches at the New School. He is also the author of Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization. Angela Dietz is the director of digital initiatives for the Missouri History Museum. She is the author of Paper Dolls Inspired by the Clothing Collection of the Missouri Historical Society.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the St. Louis Street Department generated one of the most extensive troves of photographs ever taken of the city. Ostensibly created to document municipal challenges and improvements, the images inadvertently captured richly detailed scenes of everyday life. Largely led by Charles Clement Holt (1866-1925), St. Louis's photography operation expanded until it produced about six thousand images per year in 1914. Many of these photographs were lost, but a city historian salvaged a collection of three hundred glass plate negatives in the 1950s, which are now in the Missouri Historical Society collections. This small, but superb, group of photographs provides a wealth of information on the visual culture of St. Louis during a period of rapid transformation. Capturing the City is the first book to examine these photographs, placing the people and landscapes depicted within the broader context of a swiftly urbanizing and industrializing metropolis.