Cities, 6 Photos: What Public Libraries Mean to Communities" src="http://d2srwfcq9qlp1g.cloudfront.net/images/made/img_library_dawson_allensworth_920_733_80.jpg" >

This library was built by ex-slaves in Allensworth, California. (Photo by Robert Dawson, from his new book,The Public Library: A Photographic Essay)

San Francisco-based photographer Robert Dawson has visited and snapped images of hundreds of public libraries across the United States. Now he’s turned the work of decades into a book, the recently released The Public Library: A Photographic Essay.

The roots of the project go back to Dawson’s childhood. “I came up as a young teenager in the 1960s, the Vietnam War period,” he explains. “It was a very divisive time with lots of anger and hatred. I always wanted to find ways to bring us together rather than divide us.”

He learned that people in every nook and cranny of the country saw similar meaning in their libraries. “There is, pretty universally, passionate support for the public library,” says the photographer. “Abilene, Texas, has an extremely conservative population. They passionately love their library as much as people here in liberal San Francisco. So that, to me, is kind of encouraging. It actually means that we maybe have more in common as a country than what separates us.”

Why that embrace? “It’s not a simple answer,” he says. “Libraries are complex organizations.” But he pauses and offers this: “Even if they hardly ever use their library, people have an identification with it as home. That’s where they live, what they’re about, where they’re from.” He goes on. “I think that’s one reason why people maybe want to support libraries more than other forms of government.”

All of Dawson’s photographs are gorgeous and powerful, but I asked if he would share some that show libraries that were particularly significant to the communities in which they stood. At first, he demurred: “In my experience, most of libraries that I photographed were important, some even critically important, to their communities.” But in the end, he chose these six and told their stories.

Algiers Regional Temporary Branch, New Orleans Public Library

Cities, 6 Photos: What Public Libraries Mean to Communities" src="http://d2srwfcq9qlp1g.cloudfront.net/images/made/img_library_dawson_algiers_800_655_80.jpg" >

(Photo by Robert Dawson)

“When we were there photographing in New Orleans, it was about three or four years after Katrina. The entire library system in New Orleans had been flooded, almost all the employees were laid off, and half the books were destroyed. It was a huge disaster. They had had a somewhat functional library system before that, but now, really, a lot of the libraries are like this: a trailer with AC, in hot, humid New Orleans. It’s just this heroic effort to keep the libraries open. They were all packed and the people there really use them, even though it is, even today, almost still a disastrous situation. It spoke to me. The urgency of libraries, and the need for libraries, that doesn’t just go away because there’s a natural disaster.”

Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library

Cities, 6 Photos: What Public Libraries Mean to Communities" src="http://d2srwfcq9qlp1g.cloudfront.net/images/made/img_library_dawson_chicago_800_581_80.jpg" >

(Photo by Robert Dawson)

“Chicago’s public library is one of the great library systems in the country, and they had several rooms just like that filled to infinity with people using the computers. It shows one of the evolving things that came out of the libraries over the project. When I started, 20 years ago now, this was not even part of what libraries were about. Today, it is a huge part of it. You can see here that every computer is full. Every person is intent. And it’s like this all day long in one of the giant big public libraries in the nation. Libraries now are still about books. They’re still about many things. But computers have become a big part of them.”...Continue Reading

> via Next City