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…
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…
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…
In celebration of its 125th birthday, National Geographic has launched a new Tumblr focused entirely on sharing long-lost photos buried deep within its archives. The brain-child of Nat Geo’s photo archive curator William Bonner, “Found” already features 13 photos that may never have seen the light of day had it not been for this website — with many more to come. Read more…
It seems like every few weeks another long-lost photo archive is discovered and digitized, and the newest of these archives is a set of one thousand historical images taken as part of a Farm Security Administration project in the early 20th century. The photos — some of which were taken by the likes of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Russell Lee — were originally put together to combat poverty, but have instead become an important glimpse into what was then simply everyday American life.
All one thousand will be unveiled on The New York Public Library’s digital gallery soon, but until then you can find a small sampling of the work at the NY Times Lens Blog. Not every photo is exciting, or even artistic, but all of them show an important part of American cultural, and photographic, history.
A Historic Photo Archive Re-Emerges at the New York Public Library (via Popular Photography)
As newspapers struggle to survive in this new digital media world, an Arkansas-based collector named John Rogers has quietly built the world’s largest privately owned collection of photographs by paying huge sums of money for their photo archives. He currently has about 35 million photographs purchased from newspapers including The Chicago Sun Times, The St. Petersburg Times, and The Denver Post. Of these images, he owns or shares the copyright to about 25 million.
Part of the deal in each acquisition is that Rogers’ company digitizes and meticulously organizes the images, making the digital versions available to the newspapers. Apparently his phone is “ringing off the hook” from newspapers eager to have him purchase and digitize their archives.
Collector pays newspapers millions to digitize vintage photos (via Rob Galbraith)
