In our cover story last July, Jack Neely made a strong argument that Jim Thompson's photography had a lot more to do with the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park than the photographer credited in a certain documentary that recently aired on PBS. (He also followed it up with a column on the documentary.)
We included a nice gallery of Thompson's photos, but now the McClung Historical Collection has launched the Thompson Brothers Digital Photograph Collection -- putting some 400 Smoky Mountain shots by Jim and Robin Thompson online. The navigation is a little wonky, but the results are fascinating. (Full press release after the jump.)
Historic Smoky Mountain Photos Now in UT Digital Collection
KNOXVILLE -- Historic photographs of the Great Smoky Mountains are available in a new image collection from the University of Tennessee Libraries.
The images in the Thompson Brothers Digital Photograph Collection (http://dlc.lib.utk.edu/thompson) are the work of Jim and Robin Thompson, prominent photographers in Knoxville from the 1920s through the 1940s and pioneering photographers of the Smoky Mountains.
The Thompson brothers' collection of Smoky Mountain photographs ranks among the finest visual records of the mountains before the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934. The photographs -- shot with a large-format camera and showing amazing detail -- include sweeping vistas and candid shots that document the local culture and economy before the creation of the park. Jim Thompson's spectacular photographs of the mountains played a critical role in convincing the U.S. Congress to make the Smokies the site of the first national park east of the Mississippi.
The collection includes hundreds of individual images of the Smokies gathered from UT Libraries' Special Collections and from the Calvin H. McClung Historical Collection of the Knox County Public Library, as well as Thompson photographs found in albums held by the Arnold Arboretum Horticultural Library Archives of Harvard University and Tutt Special Collections at Colorado College. The UT Libraries' Great Smoky Mountains Regional Project and Digital Library Initiatives spent more than three years gathering, digitizing and creating records for the Thompson photos.
More information on the Thompson brothers and their work is available in the 2008-2009 Library Development Review, located at http://www.lib.utk.edu/libdev/.
The Thompson Brothers Digital Photograph Collection is one of the UT Libraries' growing number of image collections documenting the history and culture of the Smoky Mountains. UT's digital collections are accessible at http://dlc.lib.utk.edu.
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