In 1983, the Smithsonian American Art Museum began collecting photographs. Today they have over 7000 images and this website offers a wonderful exploration of but a few of their holdings. The title of this collection refers to Walt Whitman's belief that photography was a quintessentially American activity, rooted in everyday people and ordinary things. The visual delights here are divided into...

The American Museum of Photography (last mentioned in the January 8, 1999 Scout Report ) is presently featuring new and exciting online exhibits covering a range of categories. Viewers can choose to enter the "private universe of photomontage artist" Scott Mutter (creator of Surrational Images) and view some of his most famous photographs, or choose to take a brief glimpse into the faces of...

While many are familiar with the romantic notion of the American cowboy as crafted by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, few share intimate knowledge of a lesser known artist, Erwin E. Smith. This online exhibit, created by the Amon Carter Museum in Texas, seeks to rectify that situation through this extensive archive of photographs by Smith that capture the world of the cowboy around the...

Douglas Menuez began his careers as an intern with the Washington Post, and over the past several decades he has covered the AIDS crisis, the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest, and a host of other topics. One of his projects included documenting the rise of Silicon Valley, and along the way he took some 250,000 photographs that together constitute an insider's look at the world of venture...

The California Museum of Photography at the University of California-Riverside, (last mentioned in the May 30, 2000 Scout Report for Social Sciences) is a site worth visiting again and again; there is always something new to look at in a variety of areas: photography history, California lifestyle and culture, fine art photography, and photo journalism. For example, the current Eadweard Muybridge...

The University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center (HRC) has a wealth of collections related to the history of photography, many of which are now available online, including the Stanley B. Burns, MD Tintypes Collection. Dr. Stanley B. Burns, who donated the collection to HRC, is a New York City ophthalmologist who began collecting historical photographs in 1975 and established the Burns...

Lawrence Denny Lindsley was born in 1878 in a house on scenic Lake Union, right in the middle of the relatively young city of Seattle, Washington. As a descendant of the early Seattle pioneer David Denny, Lindsley began to wander around the city and its environs from a young age. Like many men in the Pacific Northwest during the late 19th century, he enjoyed the outdoors, and soon developed a...

During a long career, Leslie Jones (a self-described "camera-man") took well over 40,000 photographs documenting the city of Boston and environs. Jones was a staff photographer for the Boston Herald-Traveler from 1917 to 1956, and he covered everything from a fox stuck in a tree on the Boston Common to Charles Lindbergh's U.S. tour after his historic crossing of the Atlantic. This remarkable...

Everyone's abuzz about Cindy Sherman - her current retrospective at MoMA was reviewed in the Arts sections of the "New York Times" on February 23rd, she's in the February 27th "New Yorker," and was even mentioned in the "Wall Street Journal" on March 5, in an article by Pia Catton, who admits to being skeptical of Sherman's elevated status in the art world. So it's a good thing that we can all use...

Father and son George and Huestis Cook were photographers active in the US South, particularly Virginia, from the 1860s to the 1930s. These work resulted in the George and Huestis Cook Photograph Collection at the Valentine Richmond History Center, which contains over 10,000 negatives. In 1954, 156 of these photographs were published in a book entitled Shadows in Silver. Through the Lens of Time...