Your Tax Dollars Paid for Three Troves of Photos

Your taxes fund the government, and the government funds projects to benefit the people. Leaving your potential cynicism aside, I present three remarkable historical records that are available to you for free. And although photos taken by most government agencies have always been in the public domain, it wasn’t until the past decade that the digital revolution put the photos at your fingertips. So enjoy! You paid for it.

Project Apollo Archive

Some 8,400 photos captured on lunar-hardened Hasselblad 500EL cameras were released last week on the Project Apollo Archive Flickr account. Previously, the images were available on the Apollo Image Gallery website, but the move to Flickr has made them more readily available.

Yale Photogrammar of Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information

One of the challenges of any large dataset is building tools to make specific information more discoverable. Yale’s Photogrammar team built a platform to organize 170,000 photos from 1935 to 1945 created by the FSA-OWI, and features a number of tools including geographical mapping, time delineation and filtering by photographer. The granularity of geotagging isn’t as fine as the New York Public Library’s historical photos on OldNYC, but the area is much larger. Also interesting: 4 out of the 15 photographers represented in the archive are women.

The White House Flickr Feed

There are valid criticisms about the accessibility of photojournalists to the President, but it’s hard to criticize the quality of photography coming from presidential photographer Pete Souza on The White House Flickr feed. Visual press releases? Carefully manicured marketing? Sure. But it’s also a point of view of an individual, who is by all accounts, very close to the President. In the words of the great William Albert Allard, “access and acceptance” make for incredible photos.