Try the following image-rich online resources:
Ad* Access: draw inspiration from 7,000+ vintage, North American visual advertisements
Billy Rose Theatre Division Collection at the New York Public Library: browse 150,000+ digitized images, including production photos, costume illustrations, scrapbooks, ephemera, stage manager's logs, director's notes, and more
Creative Commons: search for free content in the public domain and under Creative Commons licenses
Digital Public Library of America: see photographs, maps, personal letters, museum objects, and artwork from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States
Europeana: browse artworks, artifacts, manuscript pages, and videos from libraries, museums, and archives across Europe
Google Arts and Culture: broadly explore periods, places, and objects
Performance Design Archive Online: access drafts, sketches, and final production images for costume, lighting, projection, sound, scene, and makeup design
UNCSA Archives Digital Collections: explore the history of (U)NCSA through more than 13,000 digitized images and documents
You can search for books by title, author, subject, or keyword. Images found in books often come with good explanatory text or background information that can help you expand your search or articulate your vision.
Once you find a title connected to your topic searching our catalog online, consider coming to the library, finding your book on the shelf, and exploring titles on the surrounding shelves. This can be a very effective way to discover good content serendipitously and quickly.
The library collects many major fashion and lifestyle magazines for historical reference and inspiration. These volumes are kept on the second floor and readily available to browse (if you're looking for current issues, we keep these on the first floor behind the staircase). A few titles and their coverage dates are listed below — you'll find a lot more content when you browse stacks in the library. You can also search by title here.
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The library also provides digital access to full-page scans (images included) of many major magazines. While it's arguably harder to "browse" for content in most digital databases, good keywords can help you find what you're looking for right away in our catalog (e.g., Twiggy, Garibaldi shirt, wedding dress, etc.). You can also limit search results by date in the left hand filter if you're looking for images from a specific time period.
Use the filters on our A-Z Databases list to view just the News & Popular Culture resources, browse select titles in Flipster, our digital newsstand, or use the links below if you want to at digital versions of specific popular titles.
Life Magazine Archive, 1936--2000
Time Magazine Archive, 1923--2000
Vanity Fair Archive, 1913--1936, 1983--2015