The Daily Worker and the Daily World Negatives Collection contains printed photographic images produced through a variety of processes, created and collected by the photography editors of the Daily Worker and its successor newspapers as a means of maintaining an organized collection of images for use in publication. The collection dates from 1930 to 2006, with the bulk of the material dating from 1930 to 1948 and from 1968 to 1990. The images depict people, groups, and events associated with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). The collection contains approximately 670,000 photographic negatives in 4" x 5", 8" x 10", and 120, 127, and 35 millimeter formats; contact sheets and log sheets related to the 35 millimeter negatives; and several hundred slides. The negatives were mostly shot by Daily Worker and Daily World staff photographers, with additional negatives sent to the paper by readers and other individuals. Slides were also largely shot by staff photographers, but the collection does contain a few commercially-produced thematic slide sets, mostly from the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc countries. The majority of the negatives are of New York City people and events, despite the international coverage of the newspaper.

Images from the 1930s and 1940s focus heavily on the activities of organized labor and the relationship of the CPUSA to local and national labor unions, particularly those affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Images include strikes, union meetings and elections, union social events, and parades. Images from 1968 to 1990 focus on CPUSA activities, leaders, members, and affiliated organizations. These include portraits of Gus Hall, Henry Winston, Angela Davis, and Jarvis Tyner, and images of Mark Rudd, Abbie Hoffman, Stokely Carmichael, John Kerry, H. Rap Brown, Paul O'Dwyer, Adam Clayton Powell, Bella Abzug, John Lindsay, Nelson Rockefeller, Percy Sutton, Jacob Javits, Charles Rangel, Vito Marcantonio, Rhody McCoy, and C. Herbert Oliver. There are also negatives of conventions, demonstrations, and meetings of the CPUSA, Young Workers Liberation League, Young Communist League, and W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs. The civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements are documented through images of the Black Panther's Breakfast Program in Harlem, New York City police raiding Louis Farrakhan's Muslim Mosque, Moratorium Day demonstrations, and other anti-war demonstrations. The arts and sports are also documented in the collection, including St. Patrick's Day parades, the New York City Marathon, Apollo mission astronauts at City Hall, Aretha Franklin in concert at the Apollo Theater, jazz musicians at the Village Vanguard, and a 1968 W. E. B. Du Bois centennial meeting at Carnegie Hall whose participants included Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Baldwin. Also included are images of celebrity supporters of liberal or left-wing political causes, mainly actors such as Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Dustin Hoffman, Ed Asner, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee. Images of city life include ice cream trucks, New Jersey's Palisades Park amusement park, public school openings, and the Brooklyn-Long Island Cat Show. Images related to professional sports and athletes include sports teams affiliated with labor unions, the Hermann Matern Sports School in the German Democratic Republic, exhibition games between United States (US) and Soviet Union teams, Jim Bouton, Joe Frazier, and Muhammad Ali. Images of people and events outside of the US in the collection focus on Cuba, Chile, and the Soviet Union. From Cuba, there are images of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, the percussion ensemble Los Papines, and events including the 1970 Organization of Latin American Journalists conference and the 1978 World Festival of Youth and Students in Havana, Cuba. From Chile, there are images of rural cooperative farms, and a 1971 May Day parade in Santiago whose participants include Salvador Allende. There are numerous images of people and events in the Soviet Union, many taken on CPUSA delegations. A large percentage of these depict CPUSA leaders including Gus Hall and Henry Winston, images of rural life in Tajikistan and the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic, and international conferences, including the 1985 World Festival of Youth and Students, a 1988 United States-Soviet Union Friendship Summit in Moscow, and the 1963 World Congress of Women in Moscow.

Researchers are advised that images in the collection depict violence and individual and group responses to systemic and structural brutality in the United States throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. The language of original captions has been intentionally retained, though the captions may represent biased viewpoints or contain racist language, sexist language, and anachronistic terms.