Historic Tampa Photo Prints

The Burgert Brothers Story

The Burgert photography legacy began with Samuel Peter Burgert(b. ~1839), the son of a German immigrant who had emigrated from the Alsace region of France to Cincinnati. Samuel apprenticed in photography as a teenager, and by 1866 he had partnered as “Burgert & Smith, Photographers” on Pike and Madison in Cincinnati. He spent years as an itinerant pioneer photographer, traveling Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Missouri with a horse-drawn wagon and a folding tent he used as a darkroom, manufacturing his own glass plate negatives along the way.

By the mid-1880s, Samuel had moved his growing family to Florida, settling first in Jacksonville, where he photographed prominent citizens whose portraits are now preserved in the State Archives of Florida. The family relocated to Tampa around 1896–1897. In 1899, Samuel and his son Willard Chesney Burgert opened a studio in Ybor City under the name S.P. Burgert and Son, Photographers, on Seventh Avenue. By 1917, two of Samuel's younger sons, Albert Paul (“Al”) and Jean Everett Burgert, had taken the reins and formally established Burgert Bros., Inc., having acquired the business of their primary competitor, William A. Fishbaugh, in a move that positioned them as Tampa's premier commercial photography firm. The primary studio operated at 1515 Seventh Avenuein Ybor City, in the Sanchez & Haya Real Estate Building, with a second-floor space featuring an all-glass, northern-facing frontage roughly forty feet long that flooded the studio with the soft natural light prized by portrait photographers of the era.

For more than four decades, the Burgert Brothers 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. Tony Jannus's historic first scheduled airline flight landing on January 1, 1914. The devastation of the October 1921 hurricane, photographed by Jean Burgert and assistant Roscoe Frey through severe winds and processed overnight by candlelight. Davis Islands as it rose from the bay during the 1920s Florida boom. Civic ceremonies, business openings, hospitals, schools, prizefights, and the everyday commerce of a city in motion. Their major commercial clients included Tampa Electric (then Stone & Webster), King Edward Cigar Company, Borden's Dairy, Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, Maas Brothers, and Cuesta Rey Cigarmakers, among many others.

Beginning in 1935, the Burgerts served as Southern correspondents for Lifemagazine. Al's photographs appeared in the magazine across multiple issues from 1937 to 1943, including the celebrated “Fifty Million Watermelons go to Market” cover image of August 9, 1937, and his memorable 1938 photographs of Ringling Brothers' temperamental gorilla, Gargantua, made while Al wore a football helmet, face mask, and chest protector to fend off objects the animal hurled at photographers. The studio's work also appeared in National Geographicand nearly every Tampa newspaper that mattered. They became known for their distinctive handwritten “Burgert Brothers” signature in the bottom right corner of every photograph, their mastery of the panoramic Cirkut camera, and an in-house standard for clarity that colleagues described as “so sharp you could see every detail.”

The studio operated until 1963. Jean had sold his interest to Al in 1942 to pursue motion picture ventures; Al sold the business around 1945 to his nephew Thel Burgert and longtime employee Al Severson, who continued operating under the Burgert Brothers name until Severson's retirement. By the time the studio closed, the brothers had numbered and ledgered more than 80,000 negatives, almost certainly the most complete photographic record of any mid-sized American city from that era. After a period of changing private ownership, the collection was acquired in 1974 by the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library, along with the fourteen handwritten ledgers that catalog the negatives by number, date, and subject. Many of the originals had suffered damage from heat, humidity, and rain in the intervening years; preservation grants from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission (1988 and 1992) and the Frank E. Duckwall Foundation funded the transfer of fragile nitrate and cellulose acetate film onto modern safety stock, and the ongoing digitization of more than 20,000 imagesfor public access. The negatives themselves now live in a climate-controlled vault at the John F. Germany Public Library in downtown Tampa, with additional Burgert imagery held by the University of South Florida Digital Collections, the State Archives of Florida's “Florida Memory” project, and the University of Florida Digital Collections.

Their photographs remain the definitive visual record of Tampa's golden age — and now you can own a piece of that history.