Stories are how we communicate, how we get to know each other, how we practice empathy and compassion, how we broaden our imagination and senses (Tan)

Finding and Citing Images

Images found on the Internet are considered copyrighted.

It's important not to copy images that belong to someone else and use them as your own.

These sites are providing public domain and fair use images for educational purposes (citations still required).

Art Images

Archives of American Art, The Smithsonian - Roughly 16 million letters, photographs, diaries, oral history interviews, sketches, scrapbooks, business records, and other documents that support the study of the history of the visual arts in America.

Europeana - Europeana provides access to millions of books, music, artworks and more – with sophisticated search and filter tools to help you find what you’re looking for.

Metropolitan Museum of Art - Images of works from their permanent collection. The images may be used in unaltered form for non-commercial educational purposes, as long as the artist and museum website address are cited.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - Images of over 300,000 pieces from their collection are available on their website.

Museum of Modern Art - Nearly 30,000 images of works from their collection are available online.

National Gallery of Art - The National Gallery offers their online collection, which includes videos, podcasts, and images, for personal, educational, and non-commercial uses only.

General Images

Creative Commons Images - CC Search searches across more than 300 million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. It goes beyond simple search to aggregate results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog, and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution.

Creative Images on Flickr - Search for photos on Flickr that have one of the CC licenses.

Unsplash - Aggregates photos from a variety of photographers around the world. Search and browse free, high-resolution photos.

Pics4Learning - Pics4Learning is a curated image library that is safe and free for education. Teachers and students can use the copyright-friendly photos and illustrations for classroom projects, web sites, videos, portfolios, or any other projects in an educational setting.

Photos for Class - This is a collection of creative commons images and includes image citations.

Citing Images

The MLA Handbook indicates that images (illustrations and tables) should be placed as close to the text they relate to as possible (4.5). Each image should include a caption directly below it which will include the citation information. If the caption provides the full citation and if the source is not used in the text, then no entry is needed for the image in the Works Cited list.

What to include:

Image creator's name (artist, photographer, etc.)
Title of the image
Date the image (or work represented by the image) was created
Institution (gallery, museum) where the image is located / owned (if applicable)
Date of access (the date you accessed the online image)
Website and/or Database name

Each image must be labeled Figure - usually shortened to Fig.#.

Caption goes directly under the image

Fig. 1. Artist’s last name, First name. Title of artwork (italics if it is a work of art). Year. Name of institution/private collection housing artwork. Title of database or website. Publisher/sponsor of database or website. Medium consulted. Date of access.<URL>.

Fig. 1. Artist's last name, First name. Title of the artwork. (complete citation in the Works Cited Page)

Fig. 1. Title of image or your own description of the image. Title of the website where it was published (not Google!). Publisher. Date it was published (if you know it). Web (medium). Date that YOU saw it (today's date). Abbreviated URL.

Artwork seen in person

Degas, Edgar. The Dance Class. 1874, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Images from a website

Degas, Edgar. The Dance Class. 1874. The Met, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/438817.

Images from a book

Degas, Edgar. The Dance Class. 1875-1876. Impressionism: A Centenary Exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 12, 1974-February 10, 1975, edited by Anne Dayez, Michel Hoog, and Charles S. Moffett, [Metropolitan Museum of Art], 1974, p. 105.

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