Whether you’re a life-long Lexingtonian or newly arrived to the rolling Bluegrass, there’s always something to find in the John C. Wyatt Lexington Herald-Leader (LHL) Photographs.
Made up of an estimated 2 million unique photographic negatives spanning the years 1939-2001, the LHL photographs are an unparalleled source of photographic evidence of the many historical, cultural, and industrial changes that have shaped Lexington and its surrounding region. They comprise the most extensive, single collection of still photographic images documenting Lexington's 20th century history in existence.
While following the city’s daily news, Herald-Leader photographers captured countless moments in the everyday lives of its residents and created a visual record of the gradual changes to Lexington’s urban landscape. Together, these form the collection’s greatest strength. The collection is also noteworthy for its documentation of Central Kentucky’s agricultural, tobacco, and horse racing industries, key national events such as World War II and Vietnam, as well as notable regional and national figures.
Over 33,000 of the collection’s photographs have been digitized and are freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. The online database offers highly granular search functions, permitting users to browse the collection by date or by street (see, for example, the 260 photographs taken on Main Street).
The collection also contains associated newspaper clippings, job sheets, and hand-written photographers' notes.
The LHL photographs were donated to UK Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center in 2004 by John C. Wyatt. Wyatt, born in 1928, became a Lexington Leader photographer in 1946. He would continue taking pictures for the paper for the next 44 years – eventually becoming its chief photographer – before retiring in 1990.
Wyatt not only contributed material to the collection, but also established and maintained its original organizational scheme. Family-owned papers for many decades, the Herald and Leader were purchased in 1973 by the Knight-Ridder Corporation (and combined into the current Herald-Leader in 1983). When the new management asked the newspapers’ librarians to throw away the papers’ old photographic negatives, Wyatt rescued them from destruction. He logged every photo assignment by hand and housed and labeled every negative that the papers’ photographers produced.
Following the donation of the collection in 2004, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission awarded UK Libraries a grant to preserve and provide access to the most at-risk negatives in the collection to prevent them from deteriorating beyond use. The grant also allowed UK Libraries to transform an unprocessed and only marginally-accessible mass of photographs into the well-documented, searchable collection it is today.
In July 2006, a nearly 50,000-item database describing the first processed portion of the collection, 1939-1953, along with approximately 500 digitized images, became accessible online via the Kentucky Digital Library.
Access to the photographs was significantly advanced when the SCRC launched the collection’s custom digital library in the fall of 2019. Archivists continue to work on and digitize this massive collection today.
