Each year, some 15 million tourists pass through Washington, D.C., a city packed with monuments and museums, a city where history is made nearly every day. Yet one aspect of Washington, D.C., generally overlooked by visitors is that it is, and always has been, a city of families and neighborhoods - a place where people live and work and that they simply call home.

A new project from the Archives Center of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center has unveiled an intimate and little-known side of Washington, D.C.’s history, one that has long been hidden behind the city’s public role as the nation’s capital.

"Portraits of a City: The Scurlock Photographic Studio’s Legacy to Washington, D.C." is an online collection of more than 2,000 photographs of Washingtonians taken during the 1900s by Addison Scurlock and his sons. Scurlock, an African American photographer, made a living shooting portraits, weddings, high-school graduations, family reunions, sporting events and other events in the life of Washington’s African American community.

The United States was segregated during much of the time that the Scurlocks were in business. It was an era when the white majority of Washington, D.C., usually preferred to ignore the daily life of the African American community. For the most part, black Washingtonians lived in a separate world, a “Secret City,” in the words of Washington, D.C., historian Constance McLaughlin Green.

Yet for decades, Scurlock and his sons, Robert and George, documented this world on film. From 1911 to 1994, the Scurlock Photographic Studio was a fixture in Washington, D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood. Although esteemed and sought out by the city’s thriving black community, the Scurlock Studio was little-known to the outside world.

"The Scurlock collection is a real vision into the very vibrant community of Washington, D.C., in the 1900s," American History Museum Curator Fath Ruffins says. Addison Scurlock is considered by many to be one of America’s most talented, yet unrecognized, photographers. His photographs are a valuable resource for understanding the history of Washington, D.C., and of the nation.

A grant from the Save America’s Treasures program is helping the Archives Center make digital scans from the Scurlock negatives, create catalog records for each image and post them on the Internet at the address americanhistory.si.edu/archives/scurlock/. As the work proceeds, the staff will add thousands more of the Scurlocks’ penetrating images to the “Portraits of a City” Web site. Images and catalog information also are available online through the searchable online resource, the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System.

"Portraits of a City" is the most visible aspect of a much larger project begun by the Archives Center in 1994, when the Scurlock collection of more than 230,000 images - 30,000 photographic prints and 200,000 negatives - was acquired by the Smithsonian. This important transfer also included ledgers, appointment books, business and personal correspondence, and other records and ephemera, as well as cameras and photographic equipment.

The negatives arrived from Scurlock Studio in a variety of envelopes and other containers with information about their contents inscribed on the outside, such as the name and address of the sitter, date taken and amount charged by the studio. The negatives range from glass plates to 35-millimeter strips and 10-by-20-inch panoramas.

"Archival processing of the negatives has been slower and more complicated than we anticipated," Senior Archivist John Fleckner explains. "Many are deteriorating, so we had to move the bulk of them into off-site storage. Because negatives are harder to view, they also are more difficult to describe and organize."

The vast majority of the Scurlock photographs are portraits of individuals, family groups and organizations, as the primary business of the studio was portrait photography, explains Archivist David Haberstich, who wrote a detailed finding aid, or collection guide, for the Scurlock collection to assist researchers working in the Archives Center.

"Portrait files normally have minimal research value," Haberstich continues. "This one is different because it documents primarily one special group - middle-class African Americans in the nation’s capital during a 90-year period that included enormous social change." The collection includes images of politicians, entertainers, scientists, writers, intellectuals and academics, including George Washington Carver, Marian Anderson, Duke Ellington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Martin Luther King Jr., Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr. and Booker T. Washington. Photographs of the funeral of President John F. Kennedy and street scenes taken during the 1968 riots also are in the collection.

For decades, the Scurlocks were the official photographers for Howard University, a historically black private university in Washington, D.C., Ruffins says. "Every famous black person or person interested in African Americans who came to Washington, D.C., visited Howard. Because the Scurlocks caught them on film, their photographs offer an unusual record of the intersection of Washington, D.C.’s local history with national and international history."

"There is very little out there depicting the everyday life of Washingtonians, white or black," Fleckner adds. "Once online, the Scurlock collection will help put more people, particularly more African American people, into the visual history of Washington, D.C."