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From the U.S. Antarctic Program’s online image archive

With all the archive-plundering that’s happened over the past week, I’m finding myself spending more time looking at photos than making them. While this is nothing but normal, I’m finding that the sheer quantity of images I’ve been absorbing has been remarkeable.

For instance, the other night I sat down with a newly aquired copy of Gabriel Orozco’s book of photographs, which is quite lovely and has some excellent work in it. Over the course of twenty minutes, I saw about 100 images, which is a lot, but manageable.

Then, I sit down and peruse the Library of Congress‘ collection, which at it’s present state has digitized over ONE MILLION images. Granted, not all of these are photographs (many are posters, baseball cards, engravings, and what not), but still, the quantity is amazing. Needless to say, I didn’t make it through them all.

Here’s a few other image archives I inspected over the past week:

Charles W. Cushman archive at Indiana University

New York Public Libary’s online archive. This great archive has selections from Hine, Coburn, and Whitman’s original manuscripts.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Libarary at Yale University has archived a fair amount of negatives, books, and what-not at very good resolutions.

The U.S. Antarctic Program has established a pretty decent online archive. The great stuff is found under the ‘historical’ tab. Photos are available at high resolutions (up to 5MB) and are in the public domain.

Burning Well is sort of Freesound-type site, but for photographs. No historical images, but I’m sure there is something interesting to be found here.

Lastly, if you are really into public-domain image archives, subscribe to The Public Domain, a great blog that posts a new public-domain image each day.

And while they aren’t photos, any photo-geek would love to read Henry Fox Talbot’s letters and notes here.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Photography, Reality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.