pic.nypl.orgPIC - Photographers’ Identities Catalog

W The New York Public Library / Photographers’ Identities Catalog Photographers’ Identities Catalog Photographers’ Identities Catalog (PIC) is an experimental interface to a collection of biographical data describing photographers, studios, manufacturers, and others involved in the production of photographic images. Consisting of names, nationalities, dates, locations and more, PIC is a vast and growing resource for the historian, student, genealogist, or any lover of photography's history. The information has been culled from trusted biographical dictionaries, catalogs and databases, and from extensive original research by NYPL Photography Collection staff. Enter PIC Learn more about PIC below. Samples FAQ Background Sample Searches Learn about a topic of interest Want to read about 19th century female photographers in England? Select Female from the Gender options, England from the Address Country options, and set the end date to 1900. You could also select Wikipedia from the Sources, and within each entry, you’ll find a link directly to the article. In fact, many of the Sources have great biographies, so check them out! Try it! Find photographs by a particular photographer Trying to locate work by James Presley Ball Sr.? Search his name in the search bar, then click his name to learn what collections we know that have his photographs. Click List Locations and you'll see the zig-zagging arc of his career; try contacting museums or libraries in these places, and you may find more work by him. Try it! Identify and date your photographs Have old family photographs you’re trying to date? Many studio portraits print the photographer’s name and address on the photo. Often, PIC has the dates a studio occupied a specific address. For instance, William Watson Washburn operated a studio at 26 Camp Street, New Orleans from 1849-1853. After that he moved to 120 Canal Street. Try it! Have fun & explore! PIC has information on more than 110,000 photographers and studios, and it's growing daily. So spin the globe & have a look around. You might find world traveling photographers like Chester Burger and Kay Simmon Blumberg, photographers at the North or South Pole, or even in outer space! Try it! Samples FAQ Background Frequently Asked Questions I’m a photographer. Can I be listed in PIC? Given the ubiquity of cameras in the digital age, it’s simply not possible for us to maintain biographies for all contemporary photographers. To maintain PIC as a useful research and discovery tool, we include photographers in the collections of public institutions, or who are otherwise newsworthy. If your work is in a museum somewhere, ask them to contact us with their list of photographers. We also include many contemporary photographers with biographies in Wikipedia and WikiData, which maintain their own standards of notability. We regularly update PIC with new entries found there. I have a collection of photographs. Will PIC link to it? PIC does not track private collections or the stables of commercial galleries. If you are a museum, library, historical society, or other archive which is open to the public, we’d love to learn more about your photograph collection. Contact us at pic@nypl.org! Why do some of my results not match my query? PIC uses “fuzzy search” to give you results, so if you search for “Mary” you'll also get “Marc”. We understand, that can be a bit annoying. But if the search was too literal, you wouldn't find “Michèle” when you searched “Michele”. We think having too many results is the better problem to have. It looks like there are fewer than 116,000 names in PIC. Why is that? We "refresh" the data frequently, so you'll always see our most recent, corrected information. That process takes about 7 to 9 minutes (it's a bunch of data!). If you happen to search PIC while this is happening, you may see a lower number of constituents. Refresh your browser, and that number will grow. As of May, 2016 you should be seeing about 116,100 names. Why are there so many people on a tiny island off the west coast of Africa? That’s not actually an island, and there’s not actually anyone there. That point is located at the coordinates 0’ latitude & 0’ longitude, and we use it to map information when we don’t know a location (in the cartography world, it’s often called “ Null Island ”). If, for instance, we know someone was born in 1872, but we don’t know where, we put the point on Null Island. You can help us evacuate the island by finding locations we’re missing! I have information PIC lacks, or I’ve spotted an error. How do I contribute or request a correction? Please let us know! Use the feedback link in the bottom right of the map. It is helpful if you include the Record ID number to identify the photographer in question. That ID can be found after the Name, Nationality and Dates of the constituent. If PIC is about photographer’s identities, why is the map so prominent? Time and place can be essential information if you’re trying to identify a photographer. With hundreds of entries for people with the last name “Williams”, it would be really inefficient to scroll through, and click into, each entry to find the “Williams” active in the location you’re looking for. Also, place-names can change over time, and national borders move, so the map allows you to browse for studios in Saint Petersburg, even if the city was called Leningrad at the time. Also, PIC data skews heavily toward the United States and Europe, but we want to represent the whole of photo history. It’s important to be able to see at a glance where we have more work to do. Plus, maps are just fun! Why can’t I click a point on the map and see who’s there? We experimented with that, but for many reasons we concluded that it added more complexity and confusion to navigating the data. The good news is- there’s a neat workaround. Zoom into the area or point you’re interested in and to the left, select “In Map Area: Select Area on Map”. Then use your mouse to draw a rectangle around the area or point (click and drag), and click “Apply”. The results column will show you only the names within these boundaries. Try it yourself, search for your hometown in the Location search bar, and use this trick to see who’s there! Where did all these photographer biographies come from? We’ve listed all of our sources in each record so you can double check our work. It’s a mix of trusted books, databases and websites published by photography scholars, as well as Wikipedia and Wikidata. When a source is a US Census, City or Business Directory, Military Records or Death Records, that means NYPL staff has conducted original research on the subject. Other sources include: Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon Online Baltimore Daguerreans Craig's Daguerreian Registry Cartes de visite in Ninteenth Century Photography by William Culp Darrah Directory of Civil War Photographers by Ross J. Kelbaugh Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography by John Hannavy The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Library of Congress Authorities Lithuanian Integral Museum Information System Minnesota Historical Society’s Directory of Minnesota Photographers Photogrammar Photographers’ Association of America’s Classified Membership Directories Photographers of the Pacific Northwest Database PhotographyDatabase.org photoLondon Pioneer Photographers from the Mississippi to the Continental Divide Pioneer Photographers of the Far West Royal Commonwealth Society Index The Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names Virtual International Authority File Wikidata , and Wikipedia We'll announce other sources periodically. Is PIC an Authority File? You will notice many of the PIC entries contain links to external authorities such as VIAF , ULAN and Wikidata . These authority files provide useful persistent identifiers that ensure we are all talking about the same thing, Dorothea Lange for example . When used in the cataloging...