883 photographic prints, approx. 19.5 x 19.5 inches

These large-format aerial photographs cover extensive portions of Virginia, and include parts of the bordering states of North Carolina, Maryland, and West Virginia. They were produced as part of efforts coordinated by the U.S. Geological Survey to provide cloud-free aerial photography coverage of the United States for use by state and federal agencies.

The National High Altitude Photography program (NHAP) photographs were taken from an altitude of 40,000 feet. Each image covers approximately 68 square miles.

The National Aerial Photography Program (NAPP) photographs were taken from an altitude of 20,000 feet, and each image covers approximately 32 square miles.

Both groups were taken with color infrared film, which renders most of the vegetation in red or magenta.

Arrangement and access:

The NHAP set includes 629 photographs taken from 1980 to 1986. The NAPP set includes 254 photographs taken from 1989 to 1991. Both sets are organized by a film roll number followed by a frame number (example: 513-171 is Roll 513, Frame 171). Roll and frame numbers as well as photography dates are printed on the images. Inventories have been created for both sets, searchable by state/county and by roll/frame numbers. These inventories also include latitude and longitude data for each photograph.

Provenance:

Transferred from the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, 2012.

Adolph Bransford Rice (1909–1960) was a prolific photographer, addressing a range of commercial needs in Richmond throughout the 1950s. A well-liked businessman, Rice was active in Richmond’s Catholic community, as evidenced by his frequent photographic coverage of church activities, as well as a member of several photographic associations, and regularly contributed images to the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the News Leader. After Rice’s death at age 51, the studio went to his son, Adolph Rice Jr., who went on to serve as a staff photographer for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Library of Virginia, eventually donating his father’s entire photographic inventory to the latter. 

Browsing the collection is an exercise in discovery as one stumbles upon subjects as eclectic as funerals and Noel Coward plays, broken sidewalks and local celebrities, austere priests and laughing nuns, retail displays and Tobacco Festival parades, highway construction and traffic accidents, groundbreaking ceremonies and retail showrooms, office parties and stag parties, school field trips and Civil War reenactments, elevator operators and Easter bunnies. Unlike many commercial photographers of the period, Rice seems to have had a personal ease with his subjects, who never come off as posed or awkward.

Rice also cultivated, as a specialty, aerial views of neighborhoods, parks, and roadways, documenting the suburban infill that characterized Richmond in the 1950s and taking a bird’s-eye census of many familiar locales, such as the Carillon, Maymont Park, Southside Plaza, and the Virginia State Fairgrounds. 

Arrangement and access:
The collection is arranged chronologically.   500+ photographs are viewable on Digitool, searchable by keyword, and are also available as a Flickr photostream.

Provenance:
Donated, 1974 

References:
Emily J. and John S. Salmon’s book Historic Photographs of Richmond in the 50s, 60s, and 70s features more than 40 images drawn from the Rice Collection.

Related resources and collections:
Rice Jr.’s photographic work for the Library of Virginia also appears throughout our collections.

The collectible cigarette card, as a cultural phenomenon, originated in Richmond in 1875, created as a marketing tool by the Richmond-based tobacco manufacturer Allen & Ginter. Cigarette cards were among the first items of ephemera produced specifically for collecting and trading, to be used as proof of purchase for promotional giveaways and, in the long term, to cultivate brand loyalty. Premium albums of this type are much rarer than the individual tobacco cards and were available from the tobacco company issuing the cards in exchange for a complete set of the individual cards or in exchange for coupons issued with the cigarettes. While the tobacco cards were free in packs of cigarettes or tobacco, these albums had to be purchased (or stamps had to be sent in for postage charges).  By late in the nineteenth century, the production of cigarette cards had become an industry in itself, practically independent of its tobacco-based origins.

The album, featuring lithography by Lindner, Eddy & Clauss and published by Allen & Ginter, seems to have educational aspirations, though it has a sometimes whimsical sense of geography, suggesting that kangaroos can be found in India, and it mischaracterizes primates as quadrupeds. The album is also, to a modern sensibility, startlingly violent. The cover illustration, for starters, shows a desert with Bedouins on camel and horseback violently stealing lion cubs and slaughtering their parents with pistol and spear. Inside the album, as often as not, animals are shown in relation to the people who will kill them. The fox is paired with a red-coated hunter, the deer with a rifle-toting Indian. Moose and bear of the northeastern United States share equal space with the more exotic offerings of Africa and Asia. The only domestic animal featured in the album is a hunting dog in repose on the back cover.

Arrangement and access:
1 album, 10 one-sided cardstock pages with original string binding 

Provenance:
Unknown