Lesley University Library: Photography Research: Image Collections

Library & Research Help

The image collections below are from major museums and archives. Here are some other tips for finding images:

Get in the habit of looking at the URL under your Google Image results, click through to the source website if it's a gallery, museum, or magazine website to browse through similar images and get attribution info you need.
Click Contemporary Artistic Photographers in the guide menu for links to great sources of discovery
Visit our full Image/Streaming Media Guide for more resources

Franklin Furnace Archives
Image archive of artists’ books, performance art, site-specific works, and other time-based ephemeral arts. The images and videos cover Franklin Furnace’s first two decades, 1976-1995.
Larry Qualls Archive
More than 100,000 images from Larry Qualls' unique archive of contemporary art images. For nearly three decades, Larry Qualls has been systematically documenting contemporary art exhibitions at galleries and other exhibition spaces throughout New York City and elsewhere.

Library of Congress Prints & Photographs
Search for something specific or browse collections
Magnum Journalistic Photography Collection
Magnum's journalistic photography collection chronicling 70 years of major events in human history
George Eastman House Collection
The world’s oldest museum of photography, a longtime leader in film preservation and photographic conservation. The museum holds unparalleled collections in the fields of photography, cinema, and photographic and cinematographic technology, and photographically illustrated books.
Anacostia Community Museum
Smithsonian community museum with an exhibition program that turned to broader national themes in African American history and culture with a focus on preservation of that history.