Michael W. Lemberger spent his life documenting the history and ordinary people of southeastern Iowa, through his own photographs and by collecting images produced by other photographers in the area.
In more than 60 years as an active professional, he earned more than 100 national, regional, and state awards for excellence in photography.
After his death in 2016, his collection of images was donated by his family to the University of Iowa Libraries, Special Collections, where the collection will be archived, catalogued, digitized and made available to the public.
Through a historic and innovative collaboration between the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa, many of the images from the collection are now available through Fortepan Iowa, a curated collection of high-resolution Iowa images which can be freely used under a Creative Commons copyright license.
