Fay S. Lincoln photograph collection

Fay Sturtevant Lincoln was born in 1894 in Keene, New Hampshire. His first experience with photography came with helping his older brother print picture postcards for a local politician. Inspired by this he borrowed a camera and sold photographs to his high school senior class and his fellow soldiers after serving in WWI. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied engineering but later pursued his passion for photography. Lincoln teamed up with Peter Nyholm in 1929 to create the Nyholm amp; Lincoln studio in New York City. By 1933 Fay S. Lincoln had his own studio that remained successful until he retired in 1965.He moved to Centre Hall, Pennsylvania, where he died in 1976.

The collection contains approximately 10,000 original negatives and proof prints from Lincoln's working files. Lincoln donated these files to Pattee Library in 1973, after retiring to Centre Hall. While his portfolio documents international fairs and expositions, Lincoln specialized in architectural photography. In addition to documenting Art Deco and International Style and architecture in New York City, Lincoln also took jobs in France and in several states in the southern USA. A trip to France in 1934 resulted in his photographic study of Mont-Saint-Michel. In 1935, Lincoln was called to the eighteenth-century capital of Virginia by Colonial Williamsburg, Inc. to record the results of the restoration first begun in 1928 by John Rockefeller. Lincoln toured the deep South in 1938, photographing ante-bellum architecture in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. A number of his most successful photographs of historic architecture were published as Charleston: Photographic Studies (1946).