25, white-Latinx, plural trans therian photographer and musician. Anarcha-feminist. Occasionally NSFW

discord: hypatiacoyote


backseatpilot
@backseatpilot

I like open access collections; I don't do a lot of remixing/derivative work/whatever you want to call it, but I still find public domain images to be a fun way to study photographers' methods and find inspiration for projects. Here's where I like to go:

  • Library of Congress on Flickr strong focus on Americana and slice-of-life documentary work, as well as old postcards, greeting cards, etc.
  • Smithsonian Open Access browse or search by topic; most of it is photographs of the physical collection, but there are several thousand photos from the American Art Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery
  • The Color Of Dreams from the Albert Kahn museum in France, this is a huge collection of early autochromes from all over the world. Kahn was a banker that hired a fleet of photographers to travel the world with this new color photographic technology to document global life before the technological revolution changed things forever. Site is in French only and search only works in French.

All of these resources are public domain and free to use/download. I'd love to find more sources like these!


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in reply to @backseatpilot's post:

the internet archive's book images flickr is massive and i love it (https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/); the met has an open access collection like the smithsonian (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search?showOnly=withImage%7CopenAccess&pageSize=0&sortBy=Relevance&sortOrder=asc&searchField=All), 600dpi, the public domain museum, has a lovely selection (https://en.600dpi.net/)! some of my faves.
& @SCRAP-ULTRAWORLD left a comment with a link to this trove of public domain art links which has even more things to poke around at: https://newschoolrevolution.com/public-domain-art

edit: sorry, you were looking for photographs specifically ;;; 600dpi doesn't have many, but the other links are hopefully still useful. the photography in the internet archive books tends to be so old it's hard to get a good look at it, but may still be of some interest.
digital commonwealth has a lot of historical photos: https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search?f%5Breuse_allowed_ssi%5D%5B%5D=no+restrictions