Photojournalist Lucien Aigner and his family are donating his collected works to the proposed Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art here.
"We are honored and delighted to be able to house this great collection, and are particularly pleased that we have been able to ensure that it remains in Berkshire County, where Mr. Aigner has made his home for the past 40 years," said North Adams Mayor John Barrett III, who heads the museum's organizing committee.Aigner's photo study of Albert Einstein during his later years at Princeton University remains the enduring public image of the physicist. But his photo essays of Europe in the 1930s and New York in the 1940s captured both the famous and the commonplace.
The collection includes more than 70,000 negatives, 15,000 vintage exhibition and work printings and indexed notebooks of more than 72,000 file enlargements.
Organizers say a special gallery devoted to Aigner's work will be housed in one of the first buildings proposed for renovation in the sprawling vacant mill that promoters are seeking to convert into an $18 million arts center.
The project includes a mix of exhibition, performance and production space for various arts-related operations.
Among the groups involved: Jacob's Pillow dance center in Becket, Mass.; the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles; the American History Workshop of Brooklyn, N.Y., and the Guggenheim Museum of New York.