Lists – Image Repositories
This list reflects my personal interests. It focuses on places that make images available without fees, although it is still necessary to determine their copyright status. I sometimes post historical images on my blog.
- Ad*Access – “Over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian advertisements covering five product categories – Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II propaganda – dated between 1911 and 1955.” (The Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, Duke University Libraries)
- Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (LoC)
- Carol M. Highsmith Archive – “Highsmith, a distinguished and richly-published American photographer, has donated her work to the Library of Congress since 1992.… Her generosity in dedicating the rights to the American people for copyright free access … makes this Archive a very special visual resource.”
- Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information, Black-and-White Negatives. They also have a Color Photographs collection.
- National Child Labor Committee Collection
- Harris & Ewing Collection – Photos from glass negatives, many of them news-related. Unfortunately, the collection’s captions are meager or missing.
- Works Progress Administration (WPA) Posters
- World War I Posters
- The Met: Open-Access Online Catalog
- National Archives (USA): Photographs and Graphic Works
- The New York Public Library Digital Collections (NYPL)
- They have a lot of Farm Security Administration photographs that I have not seen in the LoC’s online holdings.
- Series of Photographic Documents of Social Conditions, 1905-1939
- World War I Photograph Albums and Postcards
- The Newberry Digital Collections
- Public Domain Image Archive from Public Domain Review
- Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division (one the NYPL’s divisions)
- Their Works Progress Administration collection includes a lot of wonderful art portraying Black life in New York in the 1930s.
- Spanish Civil War Collection at UC San Diego Library Digital Collections
Last updated: January 8, 2025