InfoGuides: Resources for Actors: Find Images and Historical Resources

Image Inspiration

Looking for images to inspire your character work? Explore these databases!

AP Images This link opens in a new window
Collects historical and contemporary imagery from Associated Press with a 50 million image print and negative archive including graphics and audio clips.
Tutorial for the AP Images database.
ARTstor This link opens in a new window
Contains over a million images documenting artistic traditions across many cultures and time periods. Updated frequently, please check back often for updated searches & collections. Note: ARTstor users must create a free account to save and share images. Users must turn off the popup blocker.
Tutorial for the ARTstor database.
Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new window
Scholarly art encyclopedia. Includes over 200,000 reference articles on every aspect of the visual arts from prehistory to the present, with selected images, written by over 6,800 scholars. Serves as the access point for Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, and other Oxford art reference resources. Tutorial for the Oxford Art Online database.

There are also many websites available that have open collections of art and historical images.

Artsy
Represents contemporary/practicing artists, with over 50,000 artworks from galleries, museums, and artists' estates
Creative Commons
CC Search is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone. Creative Commons, the nonprofit behind CC Search, is the maker of the CC licenses, used over 1.4 billion times to help creators share knowledge and creativity online. CC Search searches across more than 300 million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. It goes beyond simple search to aggregate results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog, and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution.
NYPL Digital Collections
Images digitized from the New York Public Library's collections, covering everything from historic menus to dance archives and newspaper photos.
Smithsonian Image Gallery
Includes over 530,000 electronic images from several archival repositories and museums at the Smithsonian.

Historical Resources

Historical research is key when bringing a character to life from a certain period. In order to get a fuller understanding of what every day life was like for them, here are some wonderful primary and secondary resources for historical research that are digestible for application in the multidimensional theatrical work that we do.

Daily Life through History This link opens in a new window
Supplies primary documents, reference works, monographs, images, maps, illustrations, and time lines depicting activities of daily life across the globe and throughout history. Covered time periods: Ancient (beginning of time to 4th century), Medieval (5th century to 14th century), Modern (15th century to 19th century), and Present (20th century to 21st century).
Tutorial for the Daily Life through History database.
HathiTrust This link opens in a new window
A digital preservation repository and access platform for long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in-copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.
View a tutorial on this database here.
Pop Culture Universe: Icons, Idols, Ideas This link opens in a new window
Contains information on American and world popular culture, from the 1900s to the present. Includes essays, images, quotes, and more.
Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975 This link opens in a new window
Covers a wealth of subjects and themes, from Art and Architecture to Youth Culture. Source material includes: manuscripts and typescripts; printed materials (newspapers, magazines, press kits, artist's files); video clips; visual images (photographs, advertisements, memorabilia); ephemera (pamphlets, leaflets, posters, pins, artifacts); fanzines, underground press, scripts; and government files. Tutorial for the Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975 database.