All Things Visual: The University of Chicago Visual Resources Center

Millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive are available via Google Images, only a small number of which have been published. Eventually the project will include about 10 million images. You can search specifically in the LIFE search portal, or you can add “source:life” to any Google image search to return only images from the LIFE photo archive.

The archive includes documentary photography by many well-known photographers working in the magazine industry during the hey day of photojournalism, including Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt,

The very first cover of LIFE magazine was a photograph taken by Margaret Bourke-White of Fort Peck in Montana. The issue was published on November 23, 1936. Images from the LIFE photo archive are for personal, non-commercial use only.

For more information, visit the LIFE photo archive digital collection hosted by Google Images.

Princeton University’s Index of Christian Art recently added a new collection to its Additional Resources section, an image collection called “The Lois Drewer Calendar of Saints in Byzantine Manuscripts and Frescos.”

This collection joins 12 others that include a variety of topics and media, including manuscripts, decorative arts, and paintings.

For more information, visit the Index of Christian Art and their Additional Resources.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently launched a new collections website that features a faceted search engine that facilitates both browsing and direct searching of the museum’s objects. Most importantly, however, is LACMA’s initiative to release nearly 20,000 high-quality images of art objects from their collection believed to be in the public domain. Users can freely download the images and use them as they see fit.

In the object view above, we’ve circled the location of the “Download Image” feature to highlight where to find it. After you press the button, the image will immediately download for you to save and use as you see fit, providing it is inline with LACMA’s Terms of Use.

If you want to see all of the public domain objects for which downloading a high-quality image is possible, run a search on your research term and select “Show only unrestricted images” at the top of the page. Alternatively, if you’d like to all 20,000 objects LACMA has made freely downloadable, run a blank search and select “Show only results with unrestricted images” from the top of the page.

For more information, visit the LACMA Collections or consult the Terms of Use.

For even more information, we keep our list of Copyright Lenient Images for Academic Publishing up-to-date.

Via Unframed

Project CHART has recently launched a website for the Brooklyn Visual Heritage project, which will eventually contain more than 13,000 historic photographs and images from the collections of the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Brooklyn Public Library. The Brooklyn Visual Heritage digital library is hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library and the Pratt Institute’s School of Information and Library Science collaborated on the project as well.

One of the primary goals for the BVH website is “focusing on the digitization of historic images of Brooklyn and making them easily accessible to a broad and diverse audience.”  In addition to searching across institutions or limiting your search to a specific institution, the website also provides access to discrete archival collections and thematic groups. While enlarged images are available for viewing on the website, they all bear a digital watermark (there is an option to purchase images without watermarks). The three-year-long project, nearing the final stages, was developed through an IMLS grant.

For more information, and to explore the collections, visit Brooklyn Visual Heritage.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has launched a cross-collections catalog search that provides a single access point across all of the museum’s collections, including Archives, Art & Artifacts, Library, Oral History, and Photo Archives, spanning well over 200,000 records. After performing a keyword search, users will be able to use facets to limit their search results to see specific record types, material in specific languages, and online content.

A collaborative website—The Story of the Beautiful: Freer, Whistler, and Their Points of Contact—between the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Wayne State University presents a virtual tour of James McNeil Whistler (1834–1903)’s Peacock Room. Users are given the option to visit the room as it existed in London in 1876 or as it appeared after Charles Lang Freer moved the room to Detroit and reassembled it there in 1908. In addition to panning through the 3D interior space of the room, users can click on individual objects for more information as well as supplementary content including maps, timelines, and archival material from the Charles Lang Freer Papers. The team behind the website describes their project:

The site thus functions both as a digital archive and as an immersive virtual environment in which users can explore the room, learn about the objects it has contained, and see how the places and faces associated with the room contributed to its history. Anchored by the two virtual tours, the site offers users a deeply contextualized way to navigate the collections: some 400 digital objects, among them the room itself, the objects it has contained, as well as archival materials such as photographs, bills of sale, and correspondence.

In addition to exploring the Peacock Room virtually, users can browse the obects in the collection and digitized content from the archives separately. For more information, visit the website.

Via ArtDaily.

The Archigram Group emerged in UK during the early 1960s, and while many of their projects from 1961–74 went unbuilt, they extended a significant international infuence. The Archigram Archival Project is a digital collection of the work by Archigram that is freely available online for viewing and study. Hosted by the University of Westminster, the database contains images and contextual information, linking together alternate versions created for the same project. The website describes the scope of the project:

Almost 10,000 items are included in this archive, including digital versions of drawings, collages, paintings, photographs, magazines, articles, slides and multi-media material, accompanied by original texts by Archigram wherever these are available. Around half of these items belong to the 202 projects currently listed and given project numbers by Dennis Crompton in the Archigram Archives. The rest are supporting and contextual material such as letters, photos, texts and additional projects provided by the depositors.

The AAP focuses on the main Archigram period of 1961-1974, but includes all the projects, both before and after these dates, which have been included in the project list of the Archigram Archives at the time of doing the project. The main omissions from the Archigram Archival Project website are the films, television programmes and audio-visual material which for technical or copyright reasons cannot be included at this stage. Some projects and project material have been lost over the years; both we and Archigram members would welcome approaches from anyone holding material or copies of material which is not included here.

For more information, visit the Archigram Archival Project or the Archigram website.

Via Deep Focus

The Museum of Modern Art recently launched a website for the Complete Prints & Books of Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), who was best known for her sculpture but focused on printmaking throughout her career, often using it as a tool for her creative process.  In 1990, Bourgeois donated the full archive of her printed work to MoMA, about 3,500 sheets. The new website so far contains about 400 images, but will eventually grow to contain all all 3,500 prints and will serve as the definitive scholarly work on Bourgeois, highlighting the relationships between the artist’s prints, drawings, and sculptures.

The feature-rich website, which is largely organized by theme and technique, allows users to zoom in on works, save works to a folder, and compare works in a new feature that allows users to view two related works side-by-side. The website also includes robust data about the works, including commentary, publication information, and background information on Bourgeois’ projects.

The website also allows users to download the catalogue The Prints of Louise Bourgeois in its entirety, which was published by MoMA in 1994. For more information and to explore the collection, visit Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books

Via Inside/Out

The Henry Moore Foundation recently launched an online catalog of Moore’s artwork, beginning with works owned by the Foundation. The catalog is searchable by genre, including drawings, graphics, sculptures, tapestries, and textiles as well as by thematic categories such as mother and child and reclining figures.

Users can download an enlarged image at 72 dpi, which will project well in CWAC classrooms.

For more information, visit the online catalog of Henry Moore Artworks.

The Medici Archive Project has recently launched its BIA Digital Platform which allows users to search and view digitized material from the Medici Archive, which is housed in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze. In addition to viewing archival documents, users can enter transcriptions, provide feedback, exchange comments, and participate in digital humanities projects. From the project’s website:

The Medici Granducal Archival Collection (Mediceo del Principato)–among the most exhaustive and complete court archives of early modern Europe–is one of the most frequently consulted collections at the Archivio di Stato di Firenze. Over the past fifteen years, the Medici Archive Project has been using computing technologies to facilitate scholarly research on this collection. With BIA’s launch, the Medici Archive Project will double its online text content and it will inaugurate a new digital imaging function by putting online 120,000 digitized documents—a number that will continue to grow. Additionally, BIA will enable community sourcing with new applications for online manuscript transcription and its online forums for scholarly discussion. Scholars anywhere in the world will now transcribe, edit, and comment on archival material in the database, collaborating in real time and making use of the forums to share expertise and knowledge.

The Medici Archive was established in 1569, and the material, which consists primarily of letters, takes up nearly 1 mile of shelf space. In order to search the BIA digital platform, you must register for a free account. After registering for a free account, you also can save documents and search terms pertaining to your research.

For more information, visit the Medici Archive Project or explore the collection’s highlights pertaining to topics such as Women Artists and Women Patrons of the Arts or Cabinet of Curiosities.