Where can I find Images for Documentaries?

Images are a critical part of any documentary. Listed below are several sites where you can find images to use in your documentaries.

Selected Sites – Images for Documentaries

– Visitors can quickly search the entire catalog of images or by specific collection. These collections cover a wide variety of topics, including Cartoon Drawings, Civil War Photographs, Fenton Crimean War Photographs, and Wright Brothers Negatives. If available download the image as a TIFF file for best quality.
Library of Congress Map Collection – Visitors can search the entire collection or by specific map type (i.e. Cities and Towns ; Discovery and Exploration ; Military Battles and Campaigns ; Transportation and Communication , etc) .
New York Public Library Digital Gallery Over 700,000 images from the New York Public Library’s collections are available through this digital gallery. One can search the entire gallery, by category (Cities & Buildings, Industry & Technology, etc) , or by a specific collection (, Early Landscape Photography of the American West, etc)
Flickr Commons Over 50 institutions, including the Library of Congress and the National Archives, have added images to this collection. Click here to see a list of institutions that have participated in Flickr Commons. All of the images in this collection have “no known copyright restrictions.”

Flickr Commons – Civil War Era Images

Listed below are

several institutions that have Civil War era material available on Flickr Commons.

Cornell University Library – Political Americana This collection contains a variety of material (including artifacts, photographs, prints, posters) related to US politics.
Library of Congress – Abraham Lincoln While only a small set, curators have selected images of Abraham Lincoln from different periods of his life as well as photographs of family members.
SMU Central University Libraries – Civil War Photographs . This collection includes cartes-de-visite of Civil War soldiers and generals. The full digital collection is available here.
U.S. National Archives – Mathew Brady Civil War Photographs Over 6,000 images from this collection have been digitzed. You can browse the images by subject, including Appomattox, Camp Scenes, Richmond, and Washington, DC.
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