New York Public Library Digital Gallery


 
  • The New York Public Library Digital Gallery has over 53,000 images. They range from historic photographs of New York City, the American West and the world to prints and reproductions of rare books. This links you to the main index page. Below are a few photo galleries that are highlights of the photography collection. The first page gives an overview of the collection. You can search by subject or click on "See All Images."

    1. The Pageant of America includes 7,669 original and copy photographs; albumen, platinum and silver gelatin prints; 1860s-1920s. The photographs are presented in original archival order: two series, "published" and "unpublished" photographs, exist for each of the fifteen volumes published in the 15-volume series The Pageant of America: A Pictorial History of the United States commemorating the nation's sesquicentennial in 1926.

    2. 400 Years of Native American Portraiture includes 227 gelatin silver and platinum prints by photographers Edward S. Curtis (1868-1954), Karl E. Moon (1878-1948), and Frank A. Rinehart (1862-1928), and sculptor Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1958), from the late 1890s to 1927. There are also 369 prints and drawings by Simon van de Passe (1595-1647), George Catlin (1796-1872), and Karl Bodmer (1809-1893), dating from 1627 to the 1830s.

    3. Changing New York: Photographs by Berenic Abbott 1935-1938 gives you 343 black and white photographs by Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) from her Changing New York Works Progress Administration/ Federal Art Project. The Library's collection holds about 80% of the project's 302 images; this presentation includes variant and discarded images, plus other work Abbott produced as a project employee.

    4. Early Landscape Photography of the American West lets you enjoy 234 large albumen prints from the 1860s and 1870s of American Western landscape. The locations and photographers include mammoths views of Yosemite Valley by Carleton E. Watkins and Charles L. Weed, the route of the Union Pacific Railroad through the Rocky Mountains by A.J. Russell, the Geographical surveys west of the one hundredth meridian (the Wheeler survey) by Timothy O'Sullivan and William Bell, and a collection of mammoth views by William Henry Jackson.

    5. Ellis Island Photographs includes 83 photographs (gelatin silver prints) relating to Ellis Island and immigration into the United States in the early 20th century, ranging from portraits of individual immigrants by Augustus Francis Sherman to views of the Ellis Island facility and its grounds by Edwin Levick and others.

    6. Lewis W. Hine Documentary Photographs: 1905 - 1938 depicts American social conditions and labor, including immigrants at Ellis Island and construction of the Empire State Building, Hine's principal subjects in 617 silver gelatin photographic prints.

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