The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza will spend the next two years cataloging and digitizing the archive of Bob Jackson, the Dallas Times Herald photographer whose picture of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald won a Pulitzer Prize.
The museum has received a federal grant of more than $200,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services through its Museums for America program, NBC 5 reported Saturday. The money will pay for researching, cataloging and scanning the Bob Jackson Collection: upward of 20,000 photos plus negatives, slides, prints and equipment, covering 1960 through 1978.
More than one weekend in 1963
Jackson's best-known frame was made Nov. 24, 1963, in the basement of the city's police headquarters. The museum also holds the original camera negative of that image and the 35 mm Nikon he used to take it.
But most of the collection is everyday Dallas. Beyond the assassination weekend, when he shot at Love Field, along the parade route, at Parkland hospital and at police headquarters, Jackson covered desegregation of local schools, visiting politicians, famous guests and hometown figures, plus society fixtures like the Crystal Charity Ball and Neiman Marcus Fortnight.
The museum announced in August 2025 that it had acquired Jackson's archive, calling it the largest collection of photographic images it had ever received.
What the grant pays for
The museum will hire two full-time staff members, specialists in cataloging and photo preservation, for what it calls the Bob Jackson Collection Preservation and Access Project. Their work includes building a full inventory, researching context and copyright, mapping metadata, moving materials into archival housing, and cataloging and scanning the photographs.
