There is a particular kind of photograph that stops people in a room. Not a generic stock image of an old building, but a real, specific moment in a city's life, photographed by someone who lived through it. Tampa Bay has tens of thousands of those moments preserved in a single archive, the Burgert Brothers Photographic Collection, and Bob Baggett Photography is the licensed photographer authorized by the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library to produce prints from it. After more than 45 years in Tampa Bay, this side of our work has quietly become one of the most rewarding things we do.
What the Burgert Brothers Collection actually is
In 1899, Samuel Peter Burgert and his son Willard opened a photography studio in Tampa under the name S.P. Burgert and Son. Samuel's sons Jean and Al later took the reins of the family business, and by 1917 they had established the Burgert Brothers Commercial Photography Studio, transforming what began as a portrait operation into the city's foremost commercial photography firm. For more than four decades, Al and Jean Burgert and their staff documented Tampa Bay's transformation from a frontier town into a modern city: Ybor City's cigar industry at its peak, the grand Tampa Bay Hotel before and after its conversion to the University of Tampa, Gasparilla parades through downtown, the quiet streets of Hyde Park and Seminole Heights, civic ceremonies, business openings, hurricanes, hospitals, schools, prizefights, and the everyday commerce of a city in motion. Their work appeared in Life magazine, National Geographic, and almost every Tampa newspaper that mattered. They were known for their mastery of the panoramic Cirkut camera, a large-format rotating camera that captured wide, sweeping views of crowds, buildings, and skylines that no other Tampa photographer was equipped to make. For a deeper look at the family's full history — from Samuel's itinerant photography days in Ohio and Kentucky through Al and Jean's decades running the studio — Tampa local history site TampaPix has produced the most detailed narrative account available, a five-part series drawing on the Tampa Historical Society, the academic record, and first-hand contributions from Burgert family descendants.
Why the collection still matters
The studio operated until 1963. By the time it closed, the Burgerts had amassed more than 80,000 original negatives, an unparalleled visual record of Tampa Bay across six decades, and almost certainly the most complete photographic archive of any mid-sized American city from that era. The collection was acquired by the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library in 1974, where it has been carefully preserved, with more than 20,000 images digitized and made searchable for the public. The University of South Florida's digital collections and the Florida State Archives' Florida Memory project also hold portions of the archive, giving researchers multiple institutional access points to the Burgerts' work. By any honest measure, it is the city's photographic memory, and it is the closest thing Tampa has to a continuous visual chronicle of its own history from the late nineteenth century to the early space age. For genealogy researchers, civic historians, and families with multi-generation Tampa roots, the collection is often the only surviving visual record of the people, businesses, and neighborhoods they are trying to document.
What "officially licensed" actually means
Bob Baggett Photography is the licensed photographer authorized by the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library to produce prints from the Burgert Brothers Collection. The relationship is straightforward and verifiable. Every print we ship is produced from the original archival negative or its highest-resolution preservation scan, with the full cooperation and authorization of the library that holds the collection. The library publishes the official order partnership on its own website, and the relationship has existed long enough that it is simply how Burgert prints are made. For collectors, archivists, decorators, and businesses commissioning art for permanent installation, the provenance matters: a licensed print is an authentic artifact, not a reproduction of one.
Why a licensed print looks different from a reproduction
Photographs of historic Tampa show up in a lot of places, on coffee mugs, in low-resolution reprints sold at flea markets, on tourist websites that scrape images without permission, in self-published local-history books. Very few of them are sourced legitimately from the original negatives, and the difference is immediate when you see the two side by side. A scanned-from-a-scan reproduction has the soft, slightly washed-out look of a copy of a copy, with the dust spots, contrast clipping, and tonal compression that come from going through multiple generations of digital reproduction. A print pulled from the original archival negative has depth, true blacks, real silver tones, and the kind of fine detail, the texture of cobblestones, the lettering on a storefront, the expressions of individuals in a crowd, that holds up at any size. In my opinion this is the single most important thing to understand about Burgert prints: the source matters more than the printer.
Tampa history on residential walls
In a home, a Burgert print does something a contemporary art print cannot. It places the people who live there inside a specific story, the story of the city they chose. For Tampa natives, the connection is often direct, a photograph of the street their grandfather grew up on, the cigar factory where a great-aunt worked, the church a family was married in, the hotel where a grandparent waited tables before the war. For transplants, who make up a growing share of the Tampa Bay area now, a Burgert print is the closest thing to inheriting the city's memory by adoption. The photographs tend to start conversations in a way generic landscape art does not, because every Burgert image is a real moment, and that specificity invites questions: who was that, when was that, what is that building, is that still there.
A recent residential project that comes to mind: a family restoring a 1920s Hyde Park home commissioned a 30" × 40" Burgert print of their actual street from the same decade the house was built. The photograph hangs in the entry, and the home and the print are in conversation with each other in a way no decorative print could replicate.
Tampa history on commercial walls
For Tampa Bay businesses, Burgert prints are an unusually effective way to communicate that the business actually belongs to this place. Generic stock photography in a lobby reads as decoration, the visual equivalent of background music. A real, licensed photograph of the city's history reads as commitment. The signal is quiet but consistent: a business that has chosen authentic local imagery is communicating something about its values and its roots, and clients respond to it whether they articulate the response or not. Restaurants in Ybor, law firms in downtown Tampa, hotels in St. Petersburg, medical offices throughout Hillsborough and Pinellas County, and real estate developers anchoring a new building in the city it actually rises out of, all of these are places where Burgert installations consistently outperform conventional art.
Commercial installations are where the collection's depth gets interesting. Wall-sized panoramas of 1920s downtown for hotel lobbies. Oversized lobby pieces for law firms that want their reception to communicate Tampa pedigree before a client sits down. Multi-print sequences telling a neighborhood's story across a conference room or a hallway, particularly effective for businesses headquartered in historic districts. Custom dimensions matched to specific architectural spaces, an alcove, a stair landing, a long restaurant wall.
What print sizes are available
Prints range from intimate 8" × 10" framed pieces to wall-sized statement prints up to 48" × 48", with custom dimensions available for specific installations. The print medium is matched to use: archival paper for framed pieces, larger-format printing for wall-scale work, and specialty substrates available on request for restaurants, hotels, and commercial environments where durability matters. Professional framing is available through our partners, so prints can be delivered ready to hang for clients who want a turnkey installation. For oversized work, including the full 48" × 48" panoramic format the Cirkut negatives were designed to support, the source resolution is genuinely there; these are not upscales, they are prints made from negatives that were always intended to be displayed at scale.
How to search and order from the collection
The collection is searchable directly on our historic Tampa photos page. You can also browse the library's own digital archive to explore images before ordering. Start by searching by keyword or topic, "Ybor City," "Gasparilla," "Tampa Bay Hotel," "Hyde Park," a street name, a year, a business name, a person's name, even a building or neighborhood that no longer exists. Tens of thousands of images are indexed, and most searches return more than you would expect. Click any photo to view it full-size and read whatever historical notes the library has attached, dates, locations, photographer notes, and sometimes the names of the people in the image. Choose your print size, anything from 8" × 10" up to 48" × 48", with custom and wall-size options available on request, then add it to your cart and send the order through our contact page.
How prints ship and arrive
The print is produced from the original archival negative, packaged carefully, and shipped in a protective tube. Shipping covers anywhere in the United States, which matters more than people realize, a significant share of orders come from Tampa Bay natives now living elsewhere, plus genealogy researchers and Florida history enthusiasts across the country. Framed pieces ship separately with appropriate packaging for the size and weight of the frame. For commercial installations or projects on a deadline, we coordinate timing with the client at intake so the delivery aligns with installation; we have done lobby openings, restaurant launches, and historic-building dedications where the print had to be on the wall by a specific date, and we plan accordingly.
When custom or installation-scale projects make sense
For developers, hotels, large law firms, and restaurants pursuing a more substantial installation, custom work is available and often recommended. Multi-print sequences across a long wall, a single oversized panoramic anchoring a lobby, a curated set tied to a specific neighborhood or era, a themed installation tied to the building's own history, all of these are possible. Custom installation projects usually start with a conversation about the space, the building, and what the business wants to communicate. From there we work backwards through the archive to find imagery that fits, sometimes pulling photographs the library has had catalogued for decades that have never been printed by anyone. For Tampa businesses pursuing historic-district incentives or local preservation recognition, authentic Burgert imagery often becomes part of how the building communicates its civic intentions. The Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in Ybor City has written about the collection's significance as a piece of Tampa's civic heritage, which speaks to why institutions and businesses alike continue to invest in this imagery
Ready to find your photo?
Browse the full archive on our historic Tampa photos page, or contact Bob directly to talk through a residential or commercial print project, including custom sizes, multi-print installations, and framing. After 45+ years, no Burgert print project is too small or too large to talk about.