Research guides: Images and Visual Resource Collections: Asian Image Collections

Asian Collections - All Regions

Asian Art Museum
The Asian Art Museum is home to one of the most comprehensive collections of Asian art in the world. Spanning 6,000 years and including more than 17,000 objects, the collection provides an introduction to the major traditions of Asian art and culture.
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Terms of Use:

Copyright

The Asian Art Museum is the copyright holder for all photographic transparencies and digital files of works of art in the AAM photo library. Reproduction of an AAM image without a licensing agreement will constitute an infringement of copyright.

Please note that copyright for some works of art in the museum’s collection may be owned by a third party. Requestors will be notified if additional copyright clearance will be required prior to proceeding with their request. It is the responsibility of the requestor to contact the third party for permission to reproduce the work of art where copyright is owned by a third party. The Asian Art Museum will provide whatever information it has available to assist with this process. AAM assumes no responsibility for any royalties or fees claimed by an artist or a third party.

The Asian Art Museum requires that proof of copyright clearance or proof of attempt at rights clearance be provided prior to the release of images and completion of licensing agreement. The unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or alteration of images may result in a violation of copyright laws.
East Asian Image Collection - Historical Postcards
Lin Chia-Feng Family Postcard Collection; Imperial Postcard Collection; Pacific War Postcard Collection; Michael Lewis Taiwan Postcard Collection; Gerald & Rella Warner Taiwan Postcard Collection; Gerald & Rella Warner Dutch East Indies Negative Collection; Gerald & Rella Warner Manchuria Negative Collection; and more Asian Collections from LaFayette College Libraries.
Huntington Archives - Art & Architecture in Asia
Contains nearly 300,000 original color slides and black and white and color photographs of art and architecture throughout Asia. Countries covered in the collection include India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar (Burma), China, and Japan.
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Terms of Use: "Unless otherwise noted, all images in The Huntington Archive Digital Database Collection are copyright protected to a specific copyright holder, who is noted in the database"
Images of East Asia at Harvard and Beyond
Numerous collections listed: Hedda Morrison Photographs of China 1933-1946; The Rev. Claude L. Pickens, Jr. Collection on Muslims in China, and more.
Korean Collection
University of Washington, D.C.
Trans Asia Photography
About: "The Trans-Asia Photography Review is an international refereed journal (ISSN: 2158-2025) devoted to the discussion of historic and contemporary photography from Asia. Online and free of charge, it is published by Hampshire College in collaboration with the Michigan Publishing, a division of the University of Michigan Library. Two issues are published annually, in the fall and spring. Readers can join our email list to be notified additionally about special events pertaining to photography in Asia.

The study of photography from Asia is a field that is still in its early stages, and we aim to encourage quality, depth and breadth in its development. The TAP Review brings together the perspectives of curators, historians, photographers, anthropologists, art historians and others in an effort to investigate photography from Asia as fully as possible. "
VADS - Visual Arts for Teaching

South Asian Collections

AGSL Digital Photo Collection.
Presents over 4,000 images from the holdings of the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library. The selection focuses on the countries of Asia and the Middle East. The images come from the collections acquired over many decades by the AGS Library including an extensive photographic print collection.
Digital South Asia Library. American Institute of Indian Studies
The web presentation of the AIIS photographic archive is a joint venture of the AIIS and the Digital South Asia Library program. AIIS collection is organized into four separate collections, architecture, sculpture, paintings and numismatics.
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The structure of the various databases is rather similar, many of the fields are in all four databases. For the web implemnation we have grouped the following fields together for searching purposes.

A subject search will look through data in the following fields: monument, religious affiliation, style, period, patron, index category, subject, context, materials, monument type, medium.

A location search will look through data in the following fields: country, state, district, site, monument, complex, present location.

A date search will look through data in the following fields: photo date, AIIS period, CE date.

An identification number search will look through data in the following fields: accession number, negative number, museum number.

An affliation search will look through data in the following fields: documentation reference, photographer, protected by, donor, religious affiliation, patron.

The quick search will look through data in the following fields: monument, religious affiliation, style, period, patron, index category, subject, context, materials, monument type, medium, country, state, district, site, monument, complex, present location.
Sri Lanka: Digital Library for International Research
The Furniture and Decorative Arts of Sri Lanka (FDASL) is a documentary project that produced an inventory of furniture and other decorative arts that were created in Sri Lanka and are currently owned by Sri Lanka's cultural institutions and private collections.

The inventory is presented in an image database of approximately 1,000 images of 400 unique items that were photographed by the project's principal researcher, Ayesha Abdur-Rahman, from 2006 to 2009.

Japan - Image Collections

Ohara Institute for Social Research, Hosei University. They own a collection of 2700 posters of pre-1945 period and 1400 posters of post-1945 period. Images of Japanese Labor and Social Movement in pre-1945 Japan are examples of what is included in the collection. The site is in English and Japanese.https://oisr-org.ws.hosei.ac.jp/english/public/

East Asian Library, Robarts Library at U of T subscribes to the Kikuzo II Visual for Libraries (Asahi newspaper online). This database has the Asahi Shinbun Rekishi Shashin Akaibu (Asahi Newspaper Historical photographs archive). It is in Japanese. You can browse for photographs by category. As an example, here is a link to colonial rule in Manchuria. The permanent link to this resource is http://go.utlib.ca/cat/7911786

Magic Lantern Slides Collection

here are about 1,500 magic lantern slides in the UHM Japan Collection, and these were the gifts of two donors: the Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai 国際文化振興会 (KBS), a predecessor of the present Japan Foundation 国際交流基金, and the family of the Reverend Takie Okumura 奥村多喜衛(1865-1951).

China 1917-1932, Duke University Digital Collections Primarily images from China but some also from Japan, Russian, Korea.

East Asia - China, Korea

China 1917-1932, Duke University Digital Collections
Primarily images from China but some also from Japan, Russian, Korea.
Photographs of China in 1930s - Shackford Collection
University of Manoa, Hawaii. These photographs were taken during the late 1920s and early 1930s by John B. Shackford during his travels and tenure as an English teacher in southern China.

Korean Collection University of Washington, D.C.

Small Collection of Prints on life in China, Hamilton Library, University of Hawaii.

Suotheast Asian Collection

Burma, India and Egyptian Collection in the New York Public Library Digital Collection.

Burma Collection, University of Hawaii, Hamilton Library.