Special Collections: Visual Collections at the Frances Loeb Library

HOLLIS Images is the Harvard Library's dedicated image catalog. It includes content from archives, museums, libraries, and other collections throughout Harvard University. Access to the catalog is open to the general public. Some images are restricted to the Harvard community; HarvardKey login required for access to restricted images.

Hollis Images is the catalog where images from all 73 Harvard libraries can be found. Follow the tips provided on this page for some useful information on how to use the catalog.

The Frances Loeb Library holds a collection of 150,000 aerial photographs from Aerial Photos International Inc. (API) a Norwood, Massachusetts-based company founded in 1953 by Malcolm Woronoff. The images taken by API (1953-2002) offer researchers and scholars an unprecedented opportunity to study the growth of the Boston metropolitan area and eastern Massachusetts during the mid- to late 20th century. Researchers and scholars from multiple disciplines such as history, social sciences, cultural history, sociology, geography, and the art and design fields will make use of the images as primary source material documenting changing landscape and cityscape, evolving infrastructure, building/development trends, and population growth. A portion of the collection has been digitized and is made available through HOLLIS Images. 

Consisting of nearly 3,000 lantern slide images assembled to support teaching and student presentations in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning, this collection at the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Frances Loeb Library represents a historical view of American buildings and landscapes built during the period of 1850-1920. The collection offers views of cities, specific buildings, parks, estates and gardens, including a complete history of Boston's Park System. Among the architects and landscape architects whose work is included in the collection are Marian Cruger Coffin, Ralph Adams Cram, Cass Gilbert, H.H. Richardson, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Frederick Law Olmsted, both Senior and Junior.
This collection’s digitization was part of the Library of Congress’ American Memory Project.

The link above provides the HOLLIS Images search results set of over 1,000 work records that contain the individual image records

Added to the Frances Loeb Library collections in 2011, this small collection of Alex MacLean’s work includes over 2,000 aerial photographs, taken between 1967 and 2006, features coverage of Boston and surrounding Massachusetts towns and cities, Providence, Rhode Island, and Washington, D.C.
“Pilot and photographer, Alex MacLean, has flown his plane over much of the United States documenting the landscape. Trained as an architect, he has portrayed the history and evolution of the land from vast agricultural patterns to city grids, recording changes brought about by human intervention and natural processes. His powerful and descriptive images provide clues to understanding the relationship between the natural and constructed environments.” – alexmaclean.com

Artstor - available through JSTOR - is a growing nonprofit digital library of over 2 million rights-cleared images representing the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences. The digital images are discoverable alongside journals, books, and other primary sources in JSTOR, which features an accessible suite of software tools for teaching and research.

Online access to over 500,000 photos with detailed captions from the AP news wire. Includes all photos from US and abroad added in the previous 365 days (800 per day) plus many selected historical photos from 1844 to the present.

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.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) contains metadata records —information describing an item —for millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Each record links to the original object on the content provider’s website. The DPLA brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used.

Google Images makes it easy to find the images you want in no time. Use an image you already have or type in the search box to find relevant images from across the web.

Dutch photographer Iwan Baan is known primarily for images that narrate the life and interactions that occur within architecture. Iwan collaborates with the world's foremost architects, photographing institutional, public and private projects by Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, SANAA, Morphosis, Frank Gehry, Toyo Ito, Steven Holl, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Zaha Hadid, and young architects like Sou Fujimoto, Selgas Cano among others.

Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is an online repository of free-use images, sounds, other media and JSON files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.