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You can now download nearly 70,000 hi-res early 20th century color photos from a French museum

Old photos can reveal a lot about the past, and I’m always excited to take a peek at the world that existed long before I was born. The Albert Kahn Museum in France has just made it easier: it has made nearly 70,000 hi-res, color photos available to the public.

The images are, in my opinion, truly remarkable and interesting. They show people, buildings, and events from the early 20th century captured all over the world, giving us an insight into many different cultures. They’re all in public domain, so the museum made them completely free to download and use.

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The Smithsonian puts almost 3 million high-res images online, free for everyone to download and use

The Smithsonian Institution has released an online gallery of 2.8 million images with more to come. The massive collection includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, along with nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo. And the best of all is: all photos are copyright-free and available for you to download and use.

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Paris Musées makes over 62,000 of historic photos copyright free and available online

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If you enjoy historic photos and need them for any purpose, here’s a real gem. Paris Musées has just launched an online collection with more than 100,000 digital reproductions of classic artwork. Among them, there are 62,500 photos, all of them scanned in high-resolution and publicly accessible under a CC0 license.

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Arab photography archive now lets you access 22,000 digitized historic photos

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Whether you’re learning about history or looking for inspiration, historic images are always interesting to browse through. The Arab Image Foundation is digitizing its collection. Out of half a million images, now you can access and download 22,000 of them from an online gallery – and there are more to come.

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These silly puppets will tell you about the terrible history of photography

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In the past few decades, we have witnessed rapid changes in the world of photography and cameras. The history of photography is long and rich, and tongue-in-cheek video from Glove and Boots will tell you about the bad sides of photography that came before our smartphones.

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Thinking about closed and open form pictures; or how old art history terms can still be useful

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If you were to mention the term ‘formal analysis’ to an art historian today, you’d probably be told it’s passé. No one really tries to objectively compare one painting against another using formal concepts anymore. However, formal analysis—or the concepts that it identified—does still present some interesting ideas, especially for photographers.

Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin was a key figure in formal methodology. He devised a system that compared opposing artistic concepts so that they could be applied to paintings and used to analyse them. In particular, Wölfflin was interested in trying to characterise Renaissance and Baroque art.

One pair of comparators used by Wölflinn was closed form against open form. While I’m doubtful you’re set on recreating Renaissance or Baroque pictures, knowing what the terms mean, and how they can be applied to your photos and make your audience feel about them, is useful.

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