Newspapers at the BPL: News Photographs

Archival footage from US TV news shows.

The photographer Leon Hampartzoum Abdalian was born in Cilician Armenia, Ottoman Empire (now Turkey), circa 1884. He moved with his family to the United States in April of 1896 and eventually settled in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. Locally, his photographs were published in the Boston Globe, Boston Traveler and Boston Herald newspapers. In 1930 during the Massachusetts Tercentenary celebration, the Boston Daily Record hired Abdalian as the “Photographer of Historic Shrines” and published a series of his photographs of historic monuments and buildings. Abdalian also had photographs published in The National Geographic Magazine in March of 1920 as part of an article on business in Massachusetts.

Leslie Jones (1886-1967) Biography: Staff photographer for the Boston Herald-Traveler from 1917 to 1956, Jones graduated from the Farm & Trade School on Thompson Island. Although interested in photography from his school days, Jones first worked as a pattern-maker. He freelanced as a photographer for several years while working in a Boston factory, but after losing two fingers to the machinery he joined the Herald-Traveler staff full-time. In his 39 years at the newspaper, Jones covered everything from a fox stuck in a tree on the Boston Common, to Lindbergh's U.S. tour after the aviator crossed the Atlantic. His photographs document both the usual and the unusual in the daily life of Boston.

This collection includes negatives taken by Boston press photographers dating from the 1920s through the early 1970s. It was amassed by photojournalist Dennis Brearley during the course of his career as a working photographer. From 1978 to 2012, Mr. Brearley and his wife Susan ran a photo gallery in Faneuil Hall selling prints from his photographs and the work of other press photographers in his collection. In 2013, Hunt Auctions began the process of selling the collection in lots. The Ten Pounds Collection, as it is affectionately dubbed, was purchased at auction by John Booras, a local Boston collector and amateur historian. The nickname of the collection is derived from the lot description, which consisted of the remainders of the original collection that were not deemed marketable; the lot was described and sold by weight rather than content. Mr. Booras generously donated the film negatives to Boston Public Library. The photographs in the Brearley collection provide a glimpse into the rich and eventful history of Boston in the 20th century. Strengths of the collection include politics, visiting celebrities, natural and unnatural disasters, and quirky incidents and events that add depth to the breadth of Boston's history.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Spencer Grant came to Massachusetts to attend Boston University. After graduating in 1966 with a degree in journalism, he first worked for two years as an Air Force photographer in Nebraska and later as an Associated Press photographer in New York. But the call of a girlfriend brought him back to Boston in 1969 and, while things didn't work out with the girl, he remained in Massachusetts. Over the next decade and a half, Spencer was employed as a freelance photographer for a variety of clients including UPI (United Press International), The Boston Globe, Time magazine, Boston magazine, and Esquire magazine, and he also worked on an assortment of commercial shoots. In 1971, Spencer was Stock Boston photo agency’s first photographer and, in the late 1970s, he became a stock photographer full-time. While he continues to create stock photography today, his early love of photojournalism lingers.