Eugene Levy Photograph Collection

Collection

Identifier: 2019-0020

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

The materials in the collection consist of slides, negatives, contact sheets, and photographic prints. The majority of the collection’s materials are original to Dr. Levy, though a small minority are reproductions of historical photographs, images, maps, and postcards. Dr. Levy collected these materials throughout his career for use in class lectures, journal articles, and for an unpublished manuscript–“Tracks from the Past: The Industrial Landscape of the Pittsburgh Region.”

Dates

Creation: 1975-1996, bulk 1980-1990
Creation: Majority of material found within 1980-1990

Biographical / Historical

Eugene Donald Levy was born on December 4th, 1933 in Los Angeles, California. His childhood, however, was spent in the San Bernardino Mountains in nearby San Bernardino County, California. Levy completed his undergraduate education at the University of California, Riverside before starting his graduate studies at the University of California, San Jose. Later transferring to Yale University, Levy there received his Ph.D. in American history in 1970.

In 1965, Dr. Levy took a teaching position in the History department at Carnegie Mellon. Soon after settling in Pittsburgh, Dr. Levy began photographing the region. Going out on Sunday afternoons with fellow Carnegie Mellon professor David Demarest, Dr. Levy would take pictures–both of the city’s industrial landscapes, as well as the people who inhabited them. This weekly tradition continued for nearly thirty years, during which time Dr. Levy amassed a collection of thousands of photographs of the greater Pittsburgh region.

Over the course of his nearly thirty-five year career, Dr. Levy received several awards, including the Younger Humanist Fellowship (1971) and the Elliot Dunlap Smith Award (1996). During this time, he established himself as a leading expert on the industrial history of the Pittsburgh region. His classes broadly focused on the history of the American landscape. He retired from CMU in 1999.

On December 4th, 1999, Dr. Eugene Donald Levy passed away. The Eugene Levy photograph collection reflects both his areas of research and his preferred method of study, containing over 12,000 color and black and white slides, photographs, and negatives. These materials were used throughout his career for a variety of purposes, including in classes, journal articles, and in an unpublished and incomplete manuscript on the history of the Pittsburgh region.

An exhibit of selected photographs, Images of an Industrial Landscape, 1975-1995: Photographs by Gene Levy, was held in Carnegie Mellon's Hunt Library in 2000-2001.

Reference: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Eugene Levy: Carnegie Mellon Professor Devoted to Region’s History,” December 7, 1999.

Extent

5 Linear feet (3 boxes of color slides, 1 box with three cartons of 35mm and 120mm negatives, 1 box with 2 cartons of photographs and 1 carton of 35mm slides. )

Language

English

Additional Description

Overview

Dr. Eugene Levy was a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University from 1965-1999. This collection reflects Dr. Levy’s career-long interest in the documentation and analysis of the history of the industrial landscape of the greater-Pittsburgh region. Often working with his colleague and close friend David Demarest, Levy shot photographs of mill towns outside Pittsburgh such as Homestead, Duquesne, McKeesport, and Monongahela. The collection contains photographs of the Homestead Works before and after it closed in 1982. There is also a large collection of images from Southwestern Pennsylvania cemeteries, including individual gravestones.

Arrangement

The collection is arranged into boxes. The collection consists of three main formats: 35mm slides, 35mm and 120 negatives and prints.

The slides are stored in hanging sleeves within archival boxes. Each sleeve holds a maximum of twenty slides and has a unique reference number that is often written in red. These identification numbers were used to sort the sleeves in numerical order. The negatives, contact sheets, and photographic prints are also held in plastic sleeves, though these are stored inside book-style cartons. They, too, are sorted in numerical order using their unique identification numbers.

The collection was resleeved, inventoried and numbered in an attempt to organize the collection circa 2001-2003. While portions of the collection are grouped chronologically or by subject, overall the collection does not have a clear organization.

Custodial History

This collection was given to the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries by Lorraine Levy in 2000, and then transferred to the University Archives in 2022.