Photographs / Visual Materials

Frances Benjamin Johnston, photographer. Michael Ferrell Counting House, Main St., Halifax Court House, Halifax County, North Carolina. 1938. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Photographs are not just illustrations, they are historic records that are an essential part of reasonably exhaustive research.

In addition to a spectrum of photographic materials, ranging from early daguerreotypes to modern born-digital images, the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division also holds architectural drawings, promotional posters, and much more that may pertain to the history of a building or community.

Street scenes, birds-eye-views, parades, disasters, family portraits, and other featured subjects may capture the structure you are researching and the property where it once stood or would later stand.

Explore archives at every level (local, state, federal) and seek out private family or local history collections that may include the address or location you are studying.

Prints & Photographs Online Catalog

Search the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) to find catalog records and digital images representing a rich cross-section of still pictures held by the Prints & Photographs Division and, in some cases, other units of the Library of Congress.

Although the catalog is added to on a regular basis, it is not an exhaustive listing of the holdings of the Prints & Photographs Division, which consist of more than 14 million items. Paper finding aids, card catalogs, and browsing files of pictures available on-site supplement descriptions in PPOC.

Resources

Library of Congress Collections

The Library of Congress Digital Collections contain a wide variety of photographic materials. A selection of these resources is provided below with links to the home pages for each relevant archive. You can also explore the complete list of Digital Collections to find even more and see the latest additions.

Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South
Noted architectural photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) created a systematic record of early American buildings and gardens. This collection, created primarily in the 1930s, provides more than 7,100 images showing an estimated 1,700 structures and sites in rural and urban areas of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, and to a lesser extent Florida, Mississippi, and West Virginia. Johnston’s interests resulted in vivid portrayals of the exteriors and interiors of houses, mills, and churches as well as mansions, plantations, and outbuildings.
Detroit Publishing Company Collection
This collection of photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company includes over 25,000 glass negatives and transparencies as well as about 300 color photolithograph prints, mostly of the eastern United States.
Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection
Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) was one of the first American women to achieve prominence as a photographer. Trained at the Académie Julian in Paris, she studied photography upon her return to Washington, D.C., in the mid-1880s and opened a professional studio circa 1890. Her family's social position gave Johnston access to the First Family and leading Washington political figures and launched her career as a photojournalist and portrait photographer. Johnston turned to garden and estate photography in 1910s.
Gottscho-Schleisner Collection
The collection is comprised of over 29,000 images primarily of architectural subjects, including interiors and exteriors of homes, stores, offices, factories, historic buildings, and other structures.
Highsmith (Carol M.) Archive
Photographs of landmark buildings and architectural renovation projects in Washington, D.C., and throughout the United States. The first 23 groups of photographs contain more than 2,500 images and date from 1980 to 2005, with many views in color as well as black-and-white. The archive is expected to grow to more than 100,000 photographs covering all of the United States.
Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record/Historic American Landscapes Survey
Administered since 1933 through cooperative agreements with the National Park Service, the Library of Congress, and the private sector, ongoing programs of the National Park Service have recorded America's built environment in multiformat surveys comprising more than 581,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 43,000 historic structures and sites dating from Pre-Columbian times to the twentieth century. View the Place Index to look up entries posted for your community.
Horydczak Collection
The Theodor Horydczak Collection (about 14,350 photographs online) documents the architecture and social life of the Washington metropolitan area in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, including exteriors and interiors of commercial, residential, and government buildings, as well as street scenes and views of neighborhoods.
Panoramic Photographs
The Panoramic Photograph Collection contains approximately four thousand images featuring American cityscapes, landscapes, and group portraits.
Roadside America Photographs by John Margolies
The John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive is one of the most comprehensive documentary studies of vernacular commercial structures along main streets, byways, and highways throughout the United States in the twentieth century. Photographed over a span of forty years (1969-2008) by architectural critic and curator John Margolies (1940-2016), the collection consists of 11,710 color slides (35mm film transparencies). See a complete list of digitized photographs as well as a Research Guide about the collection.

Other Digital Collections

In the digital age, it is easier than ever for photographs to be shared online. You may discover that the family, neighbors, or repositories you are reaching out to have posted some or all of their holdings to public web sites.

CatalogIt Hub External
Search across the collections of participating museums and historical societies. This database provides access to thousands of items maintained at local-level repositories.
Dead Fred External
This is a family history focused photo sharing project.
Denver Public Library Digital Collections External
This collection of over 50,000 digitized photographs chronicles the people, places, and events that shaped the settlement and growth of the Western United States.
Digital Public Library of America External
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together the riches of Americas libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world with millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more.
Flickr Commons External
Flickr Commons is a collaborative partnership with cultural institutions, originally initiated with the Library of Congress. The key goal of The Commons is to share hidden treasures from the world's public photography archives.
Flickr External
This is a large photo sharing site where many individuals post original photographs as well as scans of historic images. See also the Flickr Commons project listed on this page.
HistoryPin External
Connecting communities with local history, HistoryPin is a place for people to share photos and stories, telling the histories of their local communities.
PastPerfect Archives External
PastPerfect Online brings millions of artifacts from museums, libraries, archives, and other organizations to you from around the world. You can search through hundreds of collections at once using Artifact Search. You may also browse through the collections, filtering by Region or Speciality to narrow down the list.
Small Town America: Stereoscopic Views from the Robert Dennis Collection External
A few big cities and many more small towns long ago made the Mid-Atlantic states of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut one of the most densely populated regions in North America. This website presents 12,000 photographs of those three states as they were captured in stereoscopic views from the 1850s to the 1910s. In addition to showing buildings and street scenes in cities, towns, and villages the photographs show farming, industry, transportation, homes, businesses, local celebrations, natural disasters, people, and costumes.

The subscription resources marked with a padlock are restricted and only available to researchers on-site at the Library of Congress. If you are unable to visit the Library, you may be able to access these resources through your local public or academic library.

ArchiveGrid External This link opens in a new window

An index to historical documents, personal papers, and family histories held in archives around the world. This database contains nearly 1 million records (largely summary descriptions) of archival and manuscript collections plus more than 50,000 finding aids (detailed lists describing the content of collections) from over from 190 contributors. Also includes RLG's AMC (Archival and Mixed Collections) file. ArchiveGrid also helps researchers contact archives to request information, arrange a visit, and order copies. It also includes collection descriptions from WorldCat bibliographic records and from finding aids harvested from ArchiveGrid contributors' websites.To try the new beta version of ArchiveGrid.
ARTstor External This link opens in a new window
Contains digital art images, museum reproductions, and photograph collections documenting 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. Images are international in scope and coverage includes a wide variety of civilizations, time-periods and media. The images are drawn from different sources, such as museums, archaeological teams, photo archives, slide collections, and art reference publishers. The database is updated with new images on a regular basis.
Network restrictions at LC limit access to some images.
HUB External This link opens in a new window

Search across the collections of participating museums and historical societies. This database provides access to thousands of items maintained at local-level repositories.
PastPerfect Online External This link opens in a new window

PastPerfect Online brings millions of artifacts from museums, libraries, archives, and other organizations to you from around the world. You can search through hundreds of collections at once using Artifact Search.
SAH Archipedia: Classic Buildings External This link opens in a new window

SAH Archipedia is an authoritative online encyclopedia of the built world published by the Society of Architectural Historians and the University of Virginia Press, and contains histories, photographs, and maps for more than 8,500 structures and places. These are mostly buildings, but as you explore SAH Archipedia you will also find landscapes, infrastructure, monuments, artwork, and more. Currently, the content of SAH Archipedia is drawn from the award-winning book series, Buildings of the United States (BUS), and includes histories and thematic essays from twelve of the published BUS volumes: Massachusetts (Metropolitan Boston), Rhode Island, Pennsylvania (Eastern and Western), the District of Columbia, Virginia (Tidewater and Piedmont), West Virginia, Michigan, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, and Alaska.
SAH Archipedia will grow in the coming years, as other published BUS books are digitized (including Delaware, Louisiana, and Hawaii), as current BUS volumes are completed (Texas: Central, South, and Gulf Coast Vermont Virginia: The Valley and Southwest North Dakota Wisconsin Missouri Mississippi New Hampshire Texas: East, North, and West and Arkansas among them), and as peer-reviewed, born-digital content is created. While the immediate goal is to have all fifty states represented in SAH Archipedia, U.S. content is only the beginning. The authors envision SAH Archipedia to become a comprehensive resource for information on buildings from across the globe.

Library of Congress Research Guides

Library of Congress curators and specialists have created research guides that highlight the many diverse and useful image collections available to researchers. Below are selected highlights, you can also study the complete list of Prints & Photographs Division research guides for even more ideas.

Postcards: Greetings from the Prints & Photographs Division
This guide describes selected collections, search tips, and other resources to explore for the postcard format. Postcards were often printed with community scenes including houses, neighborhoods, events, and other local subjects that may add context to your research.
Using Local and Family History Photographs to Tell the Stories of Your Ancestors
This guide offers research strategies to search the Library of Congress print and digital collections for photographs that focus the lens on your family and strengthen your genealogical research. The same principals that aid researchers in discovering images of ancestors will help you to find pictures of the house or building you are researching, as well as the people and community associated with it.

House History: A Guide to Uncovering the Stories of Local Buildings and Properties

Local History & Genealogy: Ask a Librarian