As is often said, we live in an age where our ability to conjure images is limited only by our imagination. Today, this concept tends to refer to artificial intelligence-powered systems that generate visual material from text prompts, like DALL-E and the many others that have proliferated since. But no matter how technically impressive they are, they also reveal that our imaginations are limited and can only give form to what we can express in words. To be properly inspired again, we need to explore further afield, the visual realms of other times and places. This can be easily done with sites like: Public Work.
Jason Kottke talks about Public.work “An image search engine that boasts 100,000 ‘copyright-free’ images from institutions like the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s fast with a relatively simple interface, and it uses AI to automatically categorize and suggest images that may be related (both visually and content-wise). It’s fun just to visually click through related images.”
These journeys can take you from vintage magazine covers to foreign children’s books, from realistic foreign landscapes to detailed world maps, from Japanese woodblock prints to roadside American culture – or at least that’s been my experience.
“On the downside,” Kottke adds, “their sourcing and attribution isn’t very good, especially compared to the likes of: Flickr CommonsAccording to librarian Jessamyn West, Public Work It’s not a search engine, Cosmosdescribes itself as “the Pinterest alternative for creative people” and aims to create “a more conscious internet.”
To fully understand the story behind any particular image you find there, you’ll need to do a little research, or at least find evidence of that research elsewhere on the internet. Of course, what you do with the image is entirely up to your own creative instincts. I work here in public.
Related Content:
Creative Commons officially launches search engine that indexes over 300 million public domain images
A search engine to find free, public domain images from world-class museums
The Smithsonian has made 4.5 million high-resolution images available online and in the public domain for free use.
Download 2.6 million free images of books published over the last 500 years on Flickr
The British Library puts one million images into the public domain, making them free to reuse and remix
FREE: Download 5.3 million images from books published over the last 500 years
Based in Seoul, Colin MaOnershall Writing and broadcastingHe has written papers on cities, languages, and cultures, and his projects include the Substack newsletter. Books about cities And books A city without a state: Walking through 21st-century Los Angeles. Follow us on Twitter CollinhamOnershall or Facebook.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
