Author: arybin

Assistant Director, Visual Resources Collection, University of Chicago THATCamp Organizer
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UK National Portrait Gallery Images for Academic Use

The National Portrait Gallery now provides free downloads of a large range of images from its Collection for academic and non-commercial projects through a new web-site facility. Over 53,000 low-resolution images will now be available free of charge to non-commercial users through a standard ‘Creative Commons’ licence and over 87,000 high-resolution images will also be available free of charge for academic use through the Gallery’s own licences.

After searching or browsing to find an image you’d like to download, click “Use this image.” You will be brought to three separate licensing agreements. The Creative Commons license allows “for limited non-commercial use. Image sizes are 800 pixels on the longest dimension at 72 dpi.” When possible, higher resolution images will be made available through this same process. Be sure to attribute your images and provide links to NPG’s Creative Commons license.

Above image: Henry Fawcett; Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (née Garrett) by Ford Madox Brown; oil on canvas, 1872. NPG 1603. © National Portrait Gallery, London. Creative Commons License.

For more information, contact the NPG’s licensing office: rightsandimages@npg.org.uk

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ARTstor Images for Academic Publishing

Did you know? ARTstor offers Images for Academic Publishing, allowing you to publish high-quality images in non-commercial publications (including websites) according to terms & conditions set by contributing museums.

The Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) program makes available publication-quality images for use in scholarly publications free of charge. The IAP program was initiated by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007 to help address the challenges of scholarly publishing in the digital age by providing free images for academic publications through an automated Web-based service. IAP is now available as an optional service to all museums who wish to foster scholarly publications.

To find these images, add IAP to your search string. You can also browse by collection here.

Above image: Hat, Day by Sally Victor, 1944. Image Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Brooklyn Museum Costumes.

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Cinema Image Gallery Database Trial

The University of Chicago now has trial access to Cinema Image Gallery, an EBSCO database featuring pictures, posters, video clips, film stills and other materials from the world of moving images, starting in the late 19th century and continuing to present day.

Cinema Image Gallery presents the history of moviemaking, as well as up-to-the-minute content from recent releases, and an extensive collection of television stills.

Content Includes:

  • More than 217,000 superior-quality images
  • A treasure trove of more than 6,200 posters and lobby cards used to promote movies
  • Links to 160 full movies, and to biographical materials about notable figures in the industry
  • Portrait photography and biographies of the stars of film and television
  • Database-specific search parameters developed specifically for this resource—Title, Director, Actor Names, Genre, Awards (Academy Award, Cannes Film Festival, Screen Actors Guild)—to ensure accuracy and speed in locating relevant material

Access the trial on-campus here. Let us know what you think in the comments!

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Color Uncovered: Free App for iPad

Color Uncovered is a free app for iPad that explores various aspects of color:

How is Monet like a honeybee? What color is a whisper? Why is it so hard to find your car in a lamp-lit parking lot?

Color Uncovered features a wide spectrum of cool color-related topics to explore. Learn why friends shouldn’t let men buy bananas. Try your own color experiments on the iPad using simple items you have at home: a CD case, a drop of water, and a piece of paper. Discover how the iPad and other devices create color. Find out what causes afterimages—and more.

For more information, view the Exploratorium website.

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Newly Discovered Maya Temple a “Gold Mine” of Information for Precolumbian Scholars

Deep in the heart of the Guatemalan jungle, archaeologists have unearthed an important Maya temple thought to be at least 1,600 years old. Distinguished by giant masked faces depicting the sun god, the “Temple of the Night Sun” at El Zotz holds great potential for helping researchers further their understanding of Early Classic Maya religious practices.

Project leader Stephen Houston of Brown University explains that since Maya culture closely linked the sun god with kingship and the sun with new beginnings, the temple’s emphasis on the sun suggests that the individual buried inside was El Zotz’s first king. Furthermore, the Maya considered the structure itself to be a living being, which propelled them to continuously add new layers to its exterior. Systematic mutilation of the masks’ noses, mouths, and eyes, Houston believes, can also be thought of as “deactivation” of those features: “It’s as if they’re turning the masks off in preparation for replicating them in subsequent layers … It’s not an act of disrespect. It’s quite the opposite.”

This discovery is newly relevant to the University of Chicago art history department, since Fall 2012 marks the welcoming of Assistant Professor Claudia Brittenham, who will instruct students in Precolumbian art. In preparation for her arrival, student catalogers and scanners at the Visual Resources Center have been hard at work digitizing images for Professor Brittenham’s classes and research. Be on the lookout for an abundance of new images relating to Precolumbian art set to be uploaded to LUNA by the end of the summer!

–Emilia Mickevicius

Via National Geographic.

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Lichtenstein DotBot from the Art Institute

Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective is now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. To promote this exhibition, the museum has unveiled DotBot — an interactive web application you can use to create a comic panel of yourself, Lichtenstein-style, complete with caption, bright color, and benday dots. All you need is a computer with a webcam!

Write a message, take a snapshot, and send your dotted self to friends and family as a quick hello, birthday greeting, or invitation to come to the Art Institute and see the exhibition. You can even post your DotBot picture on Facebook.

Give it a try here. For more information about Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, click here.

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3D Reconstruction of Vermeer

An interdisciplinary team in Dresden has visualized Vermeer’s painting Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window in 3D. The project makes use of X-ray and microscopic examinations of the painting, computational reconstructions of 2D space depicted in the painting, 3D animations, scale and lifesize models, costume and makeup reconstructions, and more.

The reconstruction has been used to analyze various aspects of the painting and related works by the artist, including the construction of perspective and atmosphere in his paintings, the use of technical and visual aids, and Vermeer’s work and living environment.

For more information, see the project website.

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Virtual Museum of Islamic Art in Vienna

Many Viennese museums include important works of art from the Islamic world in their collections. Often these works are rarely exhibited, not well-known to the public or even to Islamic scholars. The Virtual Museum of Islamic Art in Vienna brings together images from disparate museums and repositories so that they may be viewed, studied, and compared in a new and meaningful context.

The virtual museum’s website is available here. Images can be accessed according to the collections (“Museen”) or according to the dates of the objects (“Zeitstreifen”). Currently the site is only available in German.

 

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Gigapixel Camera Unveiled

The prototype machine – dubbed AWARE2 – has the potential to take pictures with resolutions of up to 50 gigapixels, equivalent to 50,000 megapixels, according to the team from Duke University in North Carolina.

It works by synchronising 98 tiny cameras in a single device.

The machine is likely to be used first for military surveillance.

In its current state the researchers say it can take one-gigapixel images at up to three frames per minute.

Via BBC News. For technical information about the project from Duke, click here.

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VRC Summer Hours

Youngster Unknowingly Has Shared Her Ice Cream Stick with the Dog as She Watches Judging During the Kiddies Parade in Johnson Park in New Ulm, Minnesota

The Visual Resources Center will operate on a reduced summer schedule through Friday, August 31st.

Our summer hours will be 8:30am – 5pm, Monday-Thursday, closed Friday.

Happy summer!

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