
THE MORGUE
Purcell Carson, director/producer. Remco Bikkers, cinematographer
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"The Morgue" is a short documentary about the importance, loss and possible recovery of a newspaper photo archive, the 80,000 photos collected by The Trenton Times in New Jersey over the past century. "The Morgue" talks to newspaper photographers, archivists, and scholars—as well as community members who appear in these irreplaceable photographs—to bring the images to life and demonstrate the importance of photo morgues to the shared memories of cities.
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This documentary tells the iconic story of an orphan, following the fate of these images of Trenton across the decades, as the newspaper is sold, microfilmed, sold again, and broken apart. It is a fate that has befallen many similar photo morgues in the United States. The film is also a detective story, eventually tracking the photos down in the strip-mall warehouse of a charismatic junk dealer in Memphis, Tennessee. There, alongside dozens of other similar collections, the prints were being sold off, piecemeal, until an unlikely turn of events helped them find their way home. This film documents that journey and shows the way that similar collections—if we act quickly—might be restored to their communities of origin.
Thanks to the sixty-plus oral histories that The Trenton Project has collected over the years, our team is the only one who could make this film in this way. We've been able to comb through this collection and connect voices of Trentonians today to images of them from the morgue. Locals talk about their experiences growing up in Trenton, their memory of important events, the challenges they faced in life. Their words animate the photos, and the city.
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We've just learned that the clock is ticking. In 2025, many of the other local news archives in Memphis are being put up for sale again—their fate is uncertain. But there is a way that we can help reintroduce these collections to institutions in their communities, as other organizations work to create the financial mechanisms to return them home. At The Trenton Project, we are working with national organizations of scholars and archivists to make that happen. This film is part of that effort.
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*The images above are a quick example of our visual approach from our first shoot in November.
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