I just read this article in the NY Times about how the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY and the International Center of Photography in NYC are starting a joint venture to bring photographic masterworks online to the masses.
... officials at the Eastman House - the world's oldest photography museum, with more than 400,000 photos and negatives, dating back to the invention of the medium - felt that they needed a New York City presence. And the International Center, a younger institution with a smaller collection, wanted access to Eastman's vast holdings, which include work by Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.
...
But now both institutions are at work on an ambitious project to create one of the largest freely accessible databases of masterwork photography anywhere on the Web, a venture that will bring their collections to much greater public notice and provide an immense resource for photography aficionados, both scholars and amateurs.
The Web site - Photomuse.org, now active only as a test site, with a smattering of images - is expected to include almost 200,000 photographs when it is completed in the fall of 2006, and as both institutions work out agreements with estates and living photographers, the intention is to add tens of thousands more pictures.
A pretty awesome thing for a person like me who loves to look at photography and good for photography to keep on reaching out to more people by showing the work of the people who made photography a bona fide artform. I don't care what the snobs say about "art" being limited to some color on a canvas, bullshit.
Back to the online photo stuff... They're going to, in essence, tag all the photos, like Flickr and also provide some camera info as well, not quite full EXIF data, but pretty cool. I'm gonna say there's gonna be a ton of Leicas listed, just an educated guess.
The creators say the goal is to organize the site so that works can be found not only by the name of the photographer but also in many other ways. For example, a Hine picture of an Italian immigrant couple could be found under the headings of "immigration," or "Italian-Americans" or "Ellis Island" or "urban photography" or under the headings of exhibitions where the photograph has been shown through the years.
Each photograph could also be categorized in more technical ways, such as whether it was an albumen print, for example, or a gelatin silver print or even by what type of camera it was taken with.
I can't wait until this really gets going.
Photo: "Power House Mechanic" (1920) by Lewis Hine/Courtesy of the George Eastman Collection
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