The New York Public Magazine launched an incredibly useful photographic resource. The Photographers’ Identities Catalog (PIC) is an online collection of biographical data of around 110,000 photographers, studios, dealers and others involved in photography production.
The platform covers the entire world and history of the medium, including everything from early days daguerreotypes to present day images, making it a vast and growing resource for students, historians and photography lovers.
This project has been in the making for years. For David Lowe, Photography Specialist at the New York Public Library, PIC has been central to his work at NYPL. In 2003, he began surveying and rearranging their physical collection, noting locations of their cataloged material and storing all of a photographer’s work together, arranged alphabetically.
The beautiful interface was built by the NYPL Labs team, the Library’s digital innovation unit. The map is an experimental interface that makes use of CesiumJS, a JavaScript library for 3D maps. The information was sourced from original research by the NYPL Photography staff, as well as trusted biographical dictionaries, databases, websites published by photography scholars and catalogs, as well as Wikipedia and Wikidata.
The search and filtering options are pretty impressive. A quick search for any photographer yields a great amount of information, from basic stats like dates of birth and active years, but it can also reveal more specific details, including a map of where the photographer was active, the art collections that own the photographer’s work around the world, the photographic processes used, and more. Since the search engine is equipped with many filters, PIC is also great for exploring specific interests.
While PIC is the latest online resource for photographic information, it’s not the only one. Similar databases include Yale’s Photogrammar and the NYPL’s public domain visualization tool.
This article was written by Marielle Castillo from PSFK and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
