About the Collection
Robert Yarnall Richie (1908-1984) worked as a freelance commercial and industrial photographer for many large corporations in the automobile, aviation, chemical, mining, petroleum, railroad, shipping, steel and other industries, both in the U.S. and overseas. The Robert Yarnall Richie Photograph Collection contains corporate and industrial photographs made by Richie from 1932-1975. Richie's work is significant for its artistic qualities as well as documentary information. As a pioneer in the field, he excelled in making artistic views of corporate industrial subjects in a mid-century modernist style. Richie often took unusual angle shots creating dramatic photographs of what could have been mundane subjects.
Richie often worked for "Fortune," "Life," "Scientific American," "The American Magazine," "Time," "National Geographic" and other magazines, in addition to illustrating annual reports for Fortune 500 companies including General Motors, U.S. Steel, Gulf Oil, Phelps Dodge, and Dresser Industries among many others. Richie further branched out into shooting oil production images in such areas as Texas, Louisiana, the Gulf of Mexico, and Saudi Arabia. An avid pilot, Richie's work also contains thousands of aerial photographs from many locales, including hundreds of estates and clubs in Palm Beach, FL; Long Island, NY; Newport, RI; and other wealthy suburbs. Other aerials include well-known buildings in New York City, as well as bridges and other landmarks.
Highlights
The digital collection is arranged by negative series number. In general, the negative series number for each negative or print is chronological, i.e. lower numbers were created earlier in Richie's career than higher numbers. However, the physical collection comprises 8 series, arranged by subject and size.
Items from the following series in the finding aid are available online.
- mostly consists of smaller black and white photographic prints: 4 x 5, 5 x 7, 8 x 10, and 11 x 14-inches. In the higher negative number series, there are also some color transparencies and color negatives.
- consists of black and white contact prints mounted on client job cards. The client job cards are arranged by negative number and have contact prints mounted on board with information regarding the company for whom Richie was making the photographs, location and date.
- contains color slides and transparencies, both 35mm and 2 ¼ by 2 ¼-inch.
- consists of manuscripts, including some correspondence, client release forms, magazine clippings, personal photographs of Richie, and a scrapbook entitled, "Eyes on Richie."
- is made up of negatives. The negative sleeves often have important information about the client, location and date the negatives were made. Most of the negatives are black and white 4 x 5-inch, but there are substantial numbers of 5 x 7, and some 35mm and 2 ¼ by 2 ¼-inch. The “E” after negative numbers stands for color Ektachrome film.