Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.
[REV 25-NOV-2014]
Vintage photos of:
January 19, 1909. Macon, Georgia. "Some adolescents in Bibb Mill No. 1." Photograph and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine. View full size.
February 19, 1925. Washington, D.C. The Hine Junior High School girls' basketball team. 4x5 glass negative, National Photo Company. View full size.
August 1908. "Night Shift Leaving for Home. Indiana Glass Works, 8 a.m." Photograph and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine. View full size.
San Francisco circa 1900. "Chinatown. The street of the gamblers at night." Nitrate transparency by Arnold Genthe. View full size.
1933. A view across New York's Central Park Lake framed by the Sherry-Netherland and Plaza hotels. 5x7 safety negative by the noted architectural photographer Samuel H. Gottscho. View full size.
February 12, 1908. Montague Roberts in Times Square driving the Thomas Flyer at the start of the New York to Paris automobile race 100 years ago today. Five months later the car rolled into Paree and won, with considerable drama along the way. There's an entertaining account of the competition in the New York Times, which sponsored the event a century ago. View full size. 5x7 glass negative by George Grantham Bain, whose photos illustrate the NYT article.
December 1942. "Chicago, Illinois. Work goes on twenty-four hours a day at this Chicago and North Western Railroad yard." View full size. Medium format negative by Jack Delano for the Office of War Information.
July 1942. "Stand of virgin ponderosa pine, Malheur National Forest, Grant County, Oregon." View full size. 4x5 Kodachrome transparency by Russell Lee.