National Geodetic Survey’s Remote Sensing Photo Gallery has examples of “precision aerial photography” or coastal and airport areas in the United States. Some wonderful images in here (although one needs to use their search widget to find them, which is cumbersome). Here’s one of San Francisco’s Richmond District with Golden Gate Bridge in the background, circa 1958 (for those of you familiar with San Francisco, if you look closely, you can see that the Sutro Baths building is still there). The NGS’s library apparently contains more than a whopping 500,000 images, although only around 285 are presented here.
Standford University has a site of albumen photographs from the 19th century. The prints are displayed in themed exhibits, one of which is entitled “Photographic Views of Meiji: A Portrait of Old Japan”, a collection of 15 or so hand-colored prints.
(Both of the above found via pinniped).
Also, this has been blogged extensively but it’s worth pointing anyone who hasn’t noticed it to the New York Public Library’s Digital Library Collection called Image Gate. It hasn’t actually launched yet (they say to look for it in late Spring), but earlier this week they had a search engine on the site and a search of “Japan” brought up 537 images. At the moment, the collection has some 80,000 images total, with the goal of having 600,000 images available on the site by the end of 2004. Phew!