Frank Bingaman was one of Pittsburgh's oldest news photographers. Bingaman operated a photography studio with his father-in-law in Wilkinsburg, prior to joining the staff of the old Gazette-Times in 1904. Later he would transfer to the Chronicle-Telegraph, which was succeeded in 1927 by the Sun-Telegraph. Among the notable personalities he photographed were Theodore Roosevelt, President Taft, Andrew Carnegie, King Leopold of Belgium, and actress Lillian Russell.
In A Pittsburgh Album 1758-1958, author Roy Stryker cited a photograph taken in 1911 of an Easter Parade in front of Carnegie Music Hall: "On the scene as usual, with his bulky Graphlex camera, was Frank E. Bingaman, one of the city's first news photographers... He died in 1948 at the age of 73, leaving behind what perhaps today is the largest single collection of Pittsburgh news pictures of the first quarter of this century."
Frank Bingaman's collection of approximately 1,100 photographs were acquired by the Carnegie Library to help form the nucleus of their photographic repository, which opened in June 1960. In addition to the collection at the Pittsburgh Photographic Library, Bingaman's work is also represented at the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Prints & Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.
Source: A Pittsburgh Album 1758-1958: Two Hundred Years of Memories in Pictures and Text by Roy Stryker.
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