The Forrest Granger Collection, 1,650 photographs of Tallahassee-area people and scenes from the 1940s and 1950s, was donated to the Florida Photographic Collection in 1971 by F. Forrest Granger, a local photographer. In his early years, Granger worked on the copy desk of the Atlanta Constitution. Granger came to Tallahassee in 1944 working for the Army Navy Publishing Company photographing divisions and training sites for yearbooks which soldiers and sailors could send home. One of Granger's assignments was photographing operations at Dale Mabry Air Force base in Tallahassee. Granger and his wife, Virginia , fell in love with the city and moved to Tallahassee in 1944 so that he could open one of the city's first commercial photography studios. "He saw what he thought was a good opportunity. And he and my mother thought it would be a great place to raise children," said Dick Granger, one of the couple's three sons. Granger's first studio was in the 100 block of S. Adams Street. He later moved to an upstairs suite at 109 E. College Avenue.
As a commercial photographer, he meticulously filed and indexed his negatives.
The negatives include excellent documentation of the administrations of
Governors Millard Caldwell, Fuller Warren, Dan McCarty, Charley Johns,
and LeRoy Collins. Among other subjects photographed by Granger are the
Duke and Duchess of Windsor during their 1952 visit to Tallahassee,
gubernatorial inaugurations, parades, Florida State University,
Florida A & M University, government buildings and institutions,
street scenes, churches, commercial buidings, and regional scenes.
Granger retired from photography in 1971 and donated his negatives and prints to the Florida State Archives. He then moved to Dog island, located 60 miles southwest of Tallahasseee, where he lived for the remainder of his life. Granger died at 81 in Tallahassee on November 6, 1993. His widow, Virginia, died in March 1998.