Design Archives: Photographs

Search the Smithsonians' collection of museum objects, and library & archives materials.

One of the largest online collections of contemporary art. A growing collection of over 100,000 artworks by 18,000+ artists from leading art fairs, galleries, museums, and art institutions.

Artworks by more than 6,000 artists, with more than 45,000 objects viewable in ultra high resolution.

Freely available collection of over 5 million images from books scanned by the Internet Archive. The images range in date from 1500 to around 1923.

The city of Chicago and the history of graphic design share a long, vital association that stems back to the city's role as the geographical and railway center of the industrial part of the country. Chicago became a center for the production and distribution of printed materials: magazine, newspaper, and book publishing, endeavors that involved a great many agencies, artists, and others. From these roots, Chicago's importance in the world of graphic design grew. The Department of Printing Arts established by the School of the Art Institute in 1921; the New Bauhaus, established in Chicago in 1937; the School of Design, established in 1938 to replace the New Bauhaus and keep the Bauhaus tradition alive; the Art Director's Club of Chicago; the Society of Typographic Arts; the 27 Chicago Designers: these are only a sampling of the highlights that demonstrate the city's prominence in graphic design history. The images in this collection reflect Chicago's place in graphic design history.

Numerous graphic design and typography images. Includes a full run of Emigre magazine (click on "The Emigre Collection").

Over 6,000 searchable images from institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as 40,000 editorially selected image links to museums and galleries.

The Bridgeman Archive contains about 67,000 images from museum, art gallery and artist collections throughout the world, all copyright cleared for educational use. Includes design, maps, architecture, furniture, glass, ceramics, anthropological artifacts and more. (Access through Credo Reference).

30,000 images shot on-site at major European museums and archaeological sites in Greece, Italy, Turkey and Egypt, corresponding to subjects frequently covered in art history textbooks.