LibGuides: VIS 128E Photography and Asia: Images

Library Databases

AP Newsroom
With millions of images dating back more than 150 years, this is one of the world's largest archives of historical & current imagery. Updated every minute. Includes news, entertainment, arts, business, and sports coverage from AP and selected partners. The content includes top news stories, photos, audio clips and print graphics.
JSTOR Images (formerly ARTstor)
Library of over 2.5 million digital images and their corresponding metadata. Covers many time periods and cultures, and documents the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, anthropology, ethnographic and women's studies, as well as many other forms of visual culture
Nineteenth Century Collections Online
A multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the nineteenth century; comprised of numerous collections released over many years, including a variety of material types--monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more, primarily focused on British culture and politics, European literature, and Asian interactions with the West--in one cross-searchable location
Includes these modules:

British Politics and Society
Asia & The West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange
British Theatre, Music and Literature, High & Low Culture
Corvey Collection of European Literature, 1790-1840
SuperStar Digital Libraries' China Pictorial 人民画报
UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara users have access to the China Pictorial collection (1953-1998) in the SuperStar Digital Libraries.
Use IE browser, can also enter via Chinamaxx.net, and see under Specialty

Citing art and images

Open Access (Free) Resources

Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) Friendship Delegations Archive
This collection includes photographs contributed by members of the 1971 and 1972 CCAS delegations. Delegates took photos of places and people from a great variety of angles, providing a lens through which to understand a young China and its people during the middle of the Cultural Revolution.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
Millions of images, documents, moving images, and sound from collections around the United States.
The Frank Fischbeck Collection of Hong Kong University Library
The Frank Fischbeck Collection consists of a number of photographic formats that comprise albumen prints, silver gelatin prints, historic panorama prints, B&W and colour photographs, negatives, slides, transparencies and glass plates, which provide a visual record of the Hong Kong story from 1860 to the 2000s. The Collection embodies a broad array of photographic material covering the vast expanse of heritage, culture, traditions and religions across Hong Kong and Asia.
Getty Images
Stock photos
Korean Digital Archive (at USC)
This collection contains materials from Americans who spent important parts of their lives in Korea.
Lafayette College Libraries' East Asia Image Collections
An open-access archive of visual materials including digitized photographs, negatives, postcards, and slides donated by the Warner family
Select collections include: Sino-Japanese War Postcard, Manchuria Negatives, Taiwan Negatives, Scenic Taiwan book, and Taiwan Photographic Monthly Periodical
Metropolitan Museum of Art - Photographs
Established as an independent curatorial department in 1992, the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Photographs houses a collection of more than twenty-five thousand works spanning the history of photography from its invention in the 1830s to the present.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) - Photography
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) began collecting modern photography in 1930 and established the department in 1940. The Museum's holdings of more than 25,000 works constitute one of the most important collections of modern and contemporary photography in the world. As diverse as photography itself, the collection includes work not only by artists, but also by journalists, scientists, entrepreneurs, and amateurs.
Norman Spencer Photographs Collection
From 1999 to 2019, Norman Spencer, an American professor and photographer, repeatedly traveled to China documenting notable artists, writers, directors and musicians active in the Chinese independent and underground film and art scene. Most of the photographs were taken in Beijing and later in Dali in Yunnan Province in the southwest of China. Spencer also documented well-known Chinese artists and writers who live in exile in New York City, London, and Paris. Spanning more than twenty years, the photographs in this collection capture a rare glimpse into the lives of the Chinese film and art scene at the turn of the 21st century.
Old Japanese Photographs - Nagasaki University Digital Collection
Photographs of Japan (NYPL)
An extensive photographic documentation of Japan, and of interaction between the Japanese and foreigners from 1900-1929
Shansi: Oberlin and Asia
This online digital collection documents the activity of Oberlinians in Asia from the 1880s to the 1950s. This teaching and research collection contains materials from the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association Records and personal paper collections, and it represents a small percentage of the total amount of materials in the College Archives that relate to the work of missionaries and Shansi Representatives in China and as well as other countries.
Sidney D. Gamble Photographs Collection (at Duke)
The Sidney D. Gamble collection consists primarily of contact sheets, hand-colored glass slides, 35mm duplicate slides, contact prints, negatives, and other photographic formats documenting Gamble's four visits to China from 1908 to 1932. In total, there are over 5,000 unique images in the collection depicting urban and rural life, economic conditions, public events, agriculture, religious statuary, architecture, and the countryside. In addition to photographs of China, the collection contains a handful of images captured by Gamble from Japan and Korea and images captured by David Gamble in the western United States, circa 1906.