Last month, the Library of Congress finally finished a project they started all the way back in 2008: they finished digitizing an archive of 467 panoramic postcards from the early 1900′s. All of these postcards are now available online for interested folks to peruse through, learn from and enjoy. Read more…
About a month ago, we shared the news that the George Eastman House had become the first photo museum to join the Google Art Project — essentially making their archive of over 400,000 photos and negatives available for your browsing pleasure online.
Along those same lines, another collection of over 20,000 “rare and significant materials” is being brought to the World Wide Web. Launched earlier today, the Balboa Park Commons is an online archive that brings together over 20,000 digitized materials from seven different San Diego museums. Read more…
In the past, we’ve shared several online archives that give you access to a huge number of historical and historically significant photos online.
PhotosNormandie offered up 3,000+ CC photos from WWII, the NYC Department of Records compiled a database of over 870,000 photos of “the greatest city on earth,” and now the Finnish Defense Forces have put up an online archive of their own, showcasing almost 160,000 wartime photos from Finland during WWII. Read more…
The story of photographer Jacques Lowe and his iconic work chronicling the Kennedys and the era in US history known as Camelot is a tragic one. As President John F. Kennedy’s official photographer for three years — 2 before and 1 after he became president — Lowe captured over 40,000 photos of the Kennedy family at work and play.
Because of the immense worth these photos held to Lowe and the general public, he took great care in choosing where he would store his negatives; he chose a fire-proof bank vault in the World Trade Center. On September 11th, 2001, his entire archive was lost. Read more…
Yesterday at noon, after 20 months of planning and work, the Digital Public Library of America finally made its debut. An initiative of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, the DPLA aims to provide anyone with Internet, access to a massive online archive of content including ebooks, manuscripts, works of art and, of course, photographs. Read more…
One of the benefits of the digital age is widespread access to archives that might otherwise never be seen by more than a few people. A good example is The New York Department of Records’ database of over 870,000 photos of NYC, and a new case in point is PhotosNormandie. Read more…
For his most recent project, French photography collector and editor Thomas Sauvin has been spending his time digging though illegal silver recycling centers in Beijing. He’s doing this because buried within piles of X-Rays and CD-ROMs are hidden millions of discarded film negatives that Sauvin is intent on preserving. Read more…
Argentinian photographer Daniel Mordzinski, know for his work photographing literary giants, is accusing famous French newspaper Le Monde of trashing 27 years of his work without warning. Boxes worth of negatives and slides were allegedly thrown away when the photographer’s office at the newspaper was cleaned out without notice earlier this month. Read more…
Over the past 4 years the New York City Department of Records has been compiling an online database made up of rare photographs of “the greatest city on earth,” and now that database is available to the public. The compilation consists of over 870,000 photos ranging in subject matter from landmarks to crime scenes put together from a Municipal Archives collection of over 2.2 million photos. Read more…
Albert Kahn was a wealthy French banker who launched a project in the early 1909 that aimed to create a photographic record of the world. The first commercially successful color photography process, Autochrome Lumière, had just arrived two years earlier, and Kahn decided to use the medium to both document human life and to promote peace. He sent out an army of photographers to 50 different countries, amassing 72,000 photos and 100 hours (183,000 meters) of film that became one of the most important collections of images in human history.
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