This is my first Tuesday Tips post for the new year of 2016. I hope you find something in it that is useful and helpful, or just interesting enough to note for future research.

Photographs and design by O.V. Fowler, a Carrollton, Georgia, photographer; Class of 1915, Fourth District A & M (Ethyl Nixon Robison, David King, Fred F. Hallum, Bernard Fleming, Ruth Crane Strickland, Julian Beall, Tom Rutland, Jessie Henry Widener, Arthur Hyde, Dira Lou Foster, Laura H. Turner, Ridley Whitaker, and Abner Nixon, classmate Howard Ware is not pictured), Fourth District A & M Collection, University of West Georgia Special Collections, 2013-06-21, Fourth District Agricultural and Mechanical School records, UA-0007.

Some Photograph-Related News

In the state of Georgia:

The University of West Georgia no longer charges licensing fees to anyone, regardless of their corporate, organizational, or personal status. They will continue to have the patron making the request sign a Permission to Publish form which addresses credits, copyright, and the fact that this is one-time license. Reproduction fees for scans are still charged.

The University’s Special Collections department participated in a project to digitize and make available online the college’s yearbooks and student handbooks, which begin with 1934. Those of the A&M school, upon which the West Georgia campus is founded, begin earlier, in 1923 with The Premier, and the Aggies yearbooks and magazines, 1927-1930. These, as well as the publication Studies in the Social Sciences, can all be downloaded in various formats via the Internet Archive. The University’s other digital content resides on the Digital Library of Georgia site where you will find photographs from the education extension programs, the Carroll County area, and the Fourth District Agricultural and Mechanical School.

The big news this month, welcomed by all photo users, comes from New York City. “On January 6, 2016, The New York Public Library enhanced access to all public domain items in their Digital Collections so that everyone has the freedom to enjoy and reuse these materials.” Here is more information for you on the unlimited possibilities, and an article with examples of the many types of images available.

Illustration used in Progressive Architecture, v.10, 1929, mentioning the use of Georgia marble in the Chrysler building; The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Art & Architecture Collection, The New York Public Library, “Stages in the design for the Chrysler building,” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1929-08. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/b5b54270-a066-0130-466b-58d385a7b928

Items as updates to my series on Researching Photographers Working in the South 

The December Family Tree Magazine highlighted state-focused websites, including Alabama Mosaic ( alabamamosaic.org ), the Kentucky Digital Library ( kdl.kyvl.org ), the Maryland State Archives (www.msa.maryland.gov ), Tennessee’s Volunteer Voices ( volunteervoices.org ), and the Library of Virginia’s lva.virginia.gov. Take a look at the goodies, including photographs, that all these sites offer.

James H. “Jim” Peppler, was a staff photographer of the weekly paper, The Southern Courier, in the 1960s reporting on civil rights and social issues. His photo collection is highlighted on the Alabama Department of Archives Photographs and Pictures Collection site. Read more about various free Alabama Digital Archives on the Sassy Jane Genealogy blog. This is the the first in her new series on the States.

I have been able to document African American itinerant photographer F. P. Pepper in another Georgia town. He was in Reynolds for a few weeks each in the months of November and December 1896. I also was able to confirm his activity in Butler, which I had only guessed at before. He was there just before and just after his November 1896 foray to Reynolds. He apparently also sold frames which I did not know before. See my previous post on Pepper for more information. See also my later post on African American Photographers in Georgia.

Just For fun (but useful information)

Take a look at Maureen A. Taylor’s chart of Beards and Mustaches  – now that you can identify beard types, you might want to revisit my Wordless Wednesday post on Five Bearded Men.

Another interesting fun thing to do is to use the TinEye Reverse Image Search. This is something else I learned about from Sassy Jane. Her blog post explains this informative web-based service. It will cost nothing, but you need either an image, or a URL with an image, in order to search and find out if the same image is used elsewhere.

For example, I found two image matches for my uploaded image of a family group. Neither result was the actual source of my image, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I have discovered that the Museum no longer allows the public to download this image, which I believe is in the public domain.

You might also try Google Reverse Image Search. Click the little camera icon and drag and drop a photo, or upload one. You can also do a “search Google for this image,” in various browsers.

For those of you interested in the Daguerreotype, or in world photography, the Daguerreobase project coordinated by the European Daguerreotype Association (EDA) concluded at the end of the 2015. The last two issues of their Daguerreotype Journal for 2015 were posted for all to read, and download if you like. All their journals issued in 2014 and 2015 are found on this site. 

Good luck to you with this cold winter’s Hunting and Gathering research. And may the force be with with all of us in our many endeavors!

© E. Lee Eltzroth and Hunting & Gathering, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without  written permission from this blog’s author is prohibited. The piece can be re-blogged, and excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to E. Lee Eltzroth and Hunting & Gathering, with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.