Exhibitions & Online Albums
Anna Atkins Cyanotypes, on NYPL's Flickr Commons site
Dawn's Early Light: The First 50 Years of American Photography (Cornell University Library)
Photogrammar
- Photogrammar
An interactive Digital Humanities project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities: a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and its later iteration in the Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).
Here's an example of the kind of images you can find:
John Collier. Washington, D.C. Sewing room of self-help exchange. January, 1942.
Online Collections
Collection catalogs document materials in a museum, gallery or private collection. Usually, the catalog is in print form, but increasingly, this genre of publication is transforming into online databases of digital images and associated metadata about each piece.
To search for online collection databases, visit museum websites and look for links (often menu items) to Collections. Usually, you'll find highlights or an image database. Here is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Collection link:
You can also try Google's advanced image search (it's under "settings") and try searching for any of these words: collection gallery museum database.
Other online collections of photographs
- AfricaFocus: SIghts and Sounds of a ContinentThis collection contains more than 3000 slides, 500 photographs, and 50 hours of sounds from forty-five different countries. It is hoped that the search features of the collection will be a convenient aid to scholarship, study, and teaching of these disciplines.
- Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online CatalogMillions of archival photographs
- Center for Creative Photography Online CollectionsFeaturing Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, California Pictorialism, and the New York School.
- Flickr: The CommonsPublicly-held, open-access pictures (largely photos) from archival institutions
- George Eastman House: Photography CollectionThe photography collection at the George Eastman Museum, among the oldest and best in the world, comprises more than 400,000 photographic objects dating from the introduction of the medium in 1839 through to the present day. It encompasses works made in all major photographic processes, from daguerreotype to digital, for a wide range of purposes, from amateur pursuit to artistic enterprise, from scientific inquiry to documentary record. The collection includes work by more than eight thousand photographers, and it continues to expand.
- Getty Images: The LIFEPicture CollectionThe collection documents past cultural and political events, as well as the celebrities who helped shape our modern world – perfect for creating retrospectives and adding respected historical reference to your coverage.
- The International Center for PhotographyThe ICP permanent collection contains more than 200,000 prints and related materials that range from the earliest forms of photography to contemporary work.
- Google's LIFEPicture ArchiveMillions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today.
- Cavenish Laboratory (Historical Photographs of), Cambridge UniversityThis archive contains the first instalment of historic photographs of people, equipment and events, mostly from the early history of the Cavendish Laboratory up to about 1970. There are many classic photographs of equipment used in the pioneering discoveries made by members of the Laboratory. The preservation of the most important of these in an accessible digital Photographic Archive has been a priority...