Curating Visual Collections - tuesday 2006-10-03 0434 last modified 2006-10-03 1649
Categories: Nerdy, Daily Grind, Photography
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With the advent of a digital photo frame for playing slideshows, a fun new question: how to curate and obtain visual collections for display.

There are several immediate options: a selection of whatever I consider my best photos, photos from a particular event or timeframe, a set of friends, etc. The ever-wondrous web brings out several also-immediate options, with Apple's photocasting and flickr's friend feeds readily available for translation to my slideshow system (which, I might add, would also save on bandwidth... I didn't really implement the most intelligent caching system).

And then there are more educational and academic exercises: all of Picasso's paintings; all of Rodin or Monet or van Gogh's works; Alfred Stieglitz, Diane Arbus, or Ansel Adam's collected photographs; Alan Lee's Middle Earth sketches, or even old public domain films.

Do such fundamental collections exist? Online? For free? Is there some place I can retrieve moderately high resolution digital copies of all of Degas's work, or the best of Japanese woodcuts?

Does anybody have suggestions for an interesting collection? I've never taken any art history, and now's not a bad time to learn a bit, if the rest of the world freely shares its artistic treasures.

Comments

Hm...I wish I co...

Hm...I wish I could easy access online art galleries with high-quality images.

While I was still in college, I was able to access ARTstor, which was useful when I was writing art history papers. The images aren't high-quality enough to be worth printing, but you can zoom in & out, etc. Really nice.

Unfortunately, I'm in-between schools right now & therefore don't have a subscription. Dang it!

(Wow, this post is kind of useless. But I randomly found this site and felt like saying something. Howdy.)

Grace Ting on November 21, 2006 04:35 AM

'lo. Funny you ...

'lo. Funny you should mention ARTstor since I've been part of collaborations with them in the past. I don't think I can quite use those connections to get at their photos though. There's a lot of resources at Wikimedia Commons, but the quality and reliability's inconsistent; there are some that are photos of exhibits of paintings and others that are more useful.

Ryan Lee on November 06, 2006 10:27 PM

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