Finding Art & Visual Culture Images
Eugène Atget: Quai d'Anjou, 6h du matin, 1924. Albumen silver print from glass negative. Image via Metropolitan Museum Public Domain Images.
Image Databases
ARTStor: An image database that covers many time periods and cultures, and documents the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design, as well as many other forms of visual culture.
VCR (Visual Collections Repository): Supports research and pedagogy in the Faculty of Fine Arts by providing primary visual documents, media services and facilities to Concordia Faculty of Fine Arts professors, instructors, students and accredited outside researchers.
VCR Digital Image and Slide Collection: Currently holds over 30,000 high resolution digital images that can be downloaded and used for educational and research purposes. The repository is accessible online, and users can log in with their netname and password. The Faculty of Fine Arts Slide Collection comprises over 350,000 catalogued 35mm slides including subjects such as artifacts, paintings, photographs, ceramics, fibre works, drawing, scultpure, architecture, performance and contemporary art.
McCord Stewart Museum Photography Collection: Over 130,000 royalty-free images documenting the social history of Montreal, Quebec and Canada from the 1840s onward. Other images may be subject to restrictions.
Open Access Image Collections
- Asia Art Archive: Growing digital archive of primary source material culled by individual art practitioners and researchers in cities across Asia
- British Library (Flickr): Collection of public domain resources
- Europeana: Includes approximately 6 million digital items
- Gallica: Contains over 1,00,000 digital objects including maps and images
- Getty Open Content Images
- Google Art Project: Collaboration with some of the world’s most acclaimed art museums to enable people to discover and view more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail
- Metropolitan Museum: Almost 500,000 open access images
- MOMA: Museum of Modern Art
- New York Public Library: Growing collection of prints, photographs, maps, and more
- PHAROS: Imge database created by an international consortium of fourteen European and North American art historical photo archives
- Rijksmuseum Images: Hgh resolution images of paintings in museum collections
- Smithsonian Institution: 4+ million open access images
- Wikimedia Commons: Includes still images, videos and sounds with Creative Commons licensing
Publicly-held images, images licensed to Creative Commons & "no known copyright status"
Copyright
For information about copyright and the use of images, see the Concordia Copyright guide and in particular the section on Still images.