Walter L. Smith Jr. Photographer
Photographs from the Studios of Walter L. Smith Jr. can be found in the Archives of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Digital images of this collection are available because of the scanning efforts of Wayne State University Graduate Students in the Spring of 2009.
In addition to digitizing photographs from the collection students were asked to organize their portion of the materials into a thematic grouping and provide some historical context for the images selected. They offer an understanding of the complexity to researching photographic collections, identifying unknown individuals and putting together the story of a donor that maybe unaccounted for.
View Military Mystery the unfolding of a historical mystery of who Walter Lawrence Smith was and when he served in the military.
View Wedding Photography a look at the styles of wedding photography in the 1950s and 1960s as the wedding industry was just starting to take shape.
View Detroiters of the Past where you can see how close you live to a one or all of this collection of identified and unidentified subjects.
View Hairstyles and Status a well researched account of how the changing styles of hair could be linked to political leanings or economic status of African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s
View all images in our Image Database or a portion of the images in this album
A selection from the Walter Lawrence Smith Studio Collection. A more complete selection of images can be found in our Image Database
125 Photos