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Pathfinder: Historical Photographs

Introduction

Ever since its introduction in the 1830s, people have been fascinated with photography's ability to capture events and scenes from far away time and places. Today more than ever, many people look to old photographs to let them see how a place or event in the past really looked. More and more teachers are using historical photographs as a tool to help bring the past alive for their students. Other people use old photographs as a supplement to their historical or genealogical research, to use in advertising or corporate histories, or just to learn about their homes and communities.

Print sources

If you're looking for photographs on a particular subject, time or place, one way to find them is to look in books that deal with the history of that subject. In the credits or captions for the illustrations, you can see what collections have photographs dealing with your subject. Historical photographs are also used to illustrate books about the history of photography itself. In the Dewey Decimal numbering system (used by most public libraries) books about the photography are cataloged under 770-779. In most academic and research libraries, which use Library of Congress call numbers, photography books will be found in TR 1-1050.

If you want to learn more about how to begin using photographs, you may want to consult books like:

Roy McJunkin. A Guide to Research Using Photographs. Riverside, Calif.: California Museum of Photography, 1986.

John Schultz. Picture Research: A Practical Guide. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1991.

Historic photographs can be found in a wide variety of sources, such as libraries, archives, museums and in private collections. Your local public library or historical society may be able to help you find sources like these in your community, or you can find other sources in the latest editions of:

Directory of historical organizations in the United States and Canada, published by the American Association for State and Local History.

Directory of genealogical and historical society libraries, archives, and collections in the US and Canada.

Using the web to find collections

You can also use the World Wide Web to help you find physical sources for photographs. You can visit Repository of Primary Sources (http://www.uidaho.edu/special-collections/Other.Repositories.html) (maintained by Terry Abraham). This is a listing of over 3600 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources.

You can find other websites by using Yahoo's hierarchical listings. These sites may contain actual digitized images, or they may just inform you about the collection. Sites for repositories of photographs are found in a few different places in Yahoo, such as:

Arts--Humanities--History--U.S.--Archives

Arts--Humanities--History--U.S.--Organizations--Historical Societies

Arts--Humanities--History--By time period

Arts--Visual Arts--Photography--Exhibits--Historic

The American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) also maintains a website listingstate historical societies.

Collections on the web

However, due to their often fragile condition and the popular demand, more and more institutions are digitizing their photographic collections and making them available to the public on the World Wide Web. This offers a terrific opportunity for many people to use the collections who can't travel to their actual location, and to be able to compare photographs from different collections on the same screen.

The largest collection of digitized photographs on the web is hosted by the Library of Congress. The American Memory Collection has over 60 separate collections on a wide variety of subjects. You can browse through the individual collections, and search within them, or search for a specific topic in all the collections. This should be the first stop for anyone interested in old photographs on the web.

Many other libraries and archives are also using the web to share their collections. This just a selection of the many websites that include digitized collections of historical photographs:

• The Carnegie Branch Library for Local History: (http://www.bldr.net:8080/carnegie/cgi-bin/index.cgi) This special reference branch of the Boulder Public Library holds extensive resources for those researching the history of the Boulder (Colorado) area, including over 200,000 historic photographs from the 1860s to the 1980s. These images give an intimate and detailed picture of what life was like in the towns, farms, and mining camps of early Boulder County. Currently, over 6,000 historical images have been digitized and cataloged.
• Denver Public Library Western History Photodigitization Project (http://gowest.coalliance.org/) This site contains a selection of historic photographs from the collections of the Denver Public Library Western History/Genealogy Department and the Colorado Historical Society. These collections, which contain more than one million items, document the history of Colorado and the American West. The current on-line collection contains 65,000 images and catalog records of Native Americans, pioneers, early railroads, mining, Denver and Colorado towns.
• Florida State Archives Photographic Collection (http://www.dos.state.fl.us/fpc/) The collection spans a wide range of visual images from copies of mid-15th century maps to current photographs. The collection forms one of the most complete portraits of Florida available--one that draws its strength from family photographs, the homes of Floridians, their work, and their pastimes. The digitized collection contains over 38,000 searchable images.
• Chicago Public Library Digital Collections (http://cpl.lib.uic.edu/digital/digital.html) A series of digital exhibitions exploring aspects of that city's history, including an exhibition devoted to Harold Washington and another called "Down the Drain: The Historic Development of an Urban Infrastructure."
• The Cleveland Digital Library (http://web.ulib.csuohio.edu/SpecColl/cdl/) This site hosts a series of pointers to digital products -- text, photos, sound and video -- about the history of Greater Cleveland and the Western Reserve region of northeastern Ohio. These products may be located in the Special Collections department of the Cleveland State University Library, or may be located at other locations on the World Wide.
• Images of African Americans in the 19th Century (http://digital.nypl.org/schomburg/images_aa19/) Created from the collections of The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the New York Public Library, this site contains items drawn from collections of family photographs, some spanning several generations, the records of a professional woman's school, work by two photographers who documented the curriculum and activities of early African-American institutions of higher learning, and the personal collections of various individuals.
• The California Heritage Collection (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CalHeritage/) An online archive of over 28,000 images illustrating California's history and culture from the collections of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Selected from over 160 individual collections, this unique resource uses the latest online archiving techniques to highlight the rich themes of California's history. The California Heritage Collection is part of the Online Archive of California, a compilation of finding aids, or guides, to archival collections at more than 30 institutions.
• The Los Angeles Public Library Photo Database (http://catalog.lapl.org/a_photo.html) The Los Angeles Central Library's History Department began collecting photographs sometime before World War II and had a collection of about 13,000 images by the late 1950's. In 1981 Security Pacific National Bank gave its noted collection of 250,000 historical photographs to the people of Los Angeles and had it archived at the Central Library. Since then, the Central Library has been fortunate to receive other major collections and special archives, making the Library a resource worldwide for visual images.
• Images of American Political History (http://teachpol.tcnj.edu/amer_pol_hist/) A collection of over 500 public domain images, including photographs, of American political history.
• Small Town America: Stereoscopic Views from the Robert Dennis Collection (http://digital.nypl.org/stereoviews/) This website presents 12,000 photographs of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut as they were captured in stereoscopic views from the 1850s to the 1910s. In addition to showing buildings and street scenes in cities, towns, and villages, the photographs show farming industry, transportation, homes, businesses, local celebrations, natural disasters, people and costumes.
• The Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (http://www.aip.org/history/esva/) A collection of some 25,000 historical photographs, slides, lithographs, engravings, and other visual materials, part of the Niels Bohr Library of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics. The collection focuses on American physicists and astronomers of the twentieth century, but includes many scientists in Europe and elsewhere, in other fields related to physics, and in earlier times.
• NASA Image Exchange (http://nix.nasa.gov/) Hundreds of thousands of photos and data images from 10 NASA Centers have been linked together to create a searchable database of agency imagery covering a variety of NASA programs.

This pathfinder created by Kate Theimer

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