Detroit Publishing Company Photographs

The Library of Congress has a number of fantastic collections online. One of my favorites is that of the Detroit Publishing Company photographs. This is how the LoC describes it:

"This collection of photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company Collection includes over 25,000 glass negatives and transparencies as well as about 300 color photolithograph prints, mostly of the eastern United States. Subjects strongly represented in the collection include city and town views, including streets and architecture; parks and gardens; recreation; and industrial and work scenes."

Most are from the early decades of the 20th century, and most include high resolution scans. These can be downloaded and with an image viewer you can zoom in on all sorts of details.

The photo at left of Main Street in Northampton, Massachusetts, was taken in 1907. The page at the LoC for this image offers four different resolutions. The higher two are in TIFF format, which is a "lossless" format, as opposed to JPEG, which uses compression to save space. The trade-off to saving space is that each time you save the file, some amount of detail is lost.

In the photo all the people seem to be far off on the periphery. But here are some zooms from the highest resolution version of the photo:

Here's another image. This one is of a Labor Day celebration in Buffalo in 1900. This one has a great crowd scene.






Here are some close-ups:

The image I use as a background is another from Buffalo. I can spend an hour just scanning one photo.