Welcome!
The American Landscape Project is a free, online, archive of photos and slides chronicling the built environment of the United States. Additional collections including photos of Europe, Asia, and Africa are coming online.
Most of the photos were taken by geographers and they include a stunning variety of landscapes, topics, regions, and eras. Much of it is mundane, ordinary, vernacular, and wonderful. Some of the collection chronicles the unique, different, exotic, and weird.
Some of the photography is quite good. Some photos suffer from the limitations of the photographic technology of the past, especially the old slide film. Nonetheless, this is a valuable archive of photos that students of landscape, geography, urban planning, sociology, and anthropology should find educational and fun.
Hopefully, it will spur your own exploration of the cultural landscape.
The site is under construction and will remain under construction for the foreseeable future as the collection is placed online.
It should really be housed more properly at the Library of Congress, or some other legitimate photographic repository, but my grant acquisition skills and energies are limited.
What sort of photos are archived at this site?
Much of what is archived on this website are photos of the American vernacular landscape. There are lots of photos of ordinary buildings, folk architecture, gas stations, motels, road signs, churches, parks, restaurants, etc.
The Larry Ford Collection contains thousands of photos taken in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.
To those who have learned to see as a geographer, there is much more; infinitely more.
This website is dedicated in part to keeping alive the considerable legacy of
Google Issues
I have been moving this photographic image collection to this site for several years, but numerous #GoogleProblems have plagued the efficient and reliable movement of the image collection. Google unceremoniously deprecated their excellent desktop photo management software (Picasa) and encouraged users to move their collections to Google+ - which I did - and Google killed it off too. Google Photos, which is where I've been trying to host the photos had an unhappy integration with Google Drive (storage) which resulted in the wild and irregular duplication of some photos. As a result, I have now have 10 copies of some images, and they are randomly missing missing tags, captions, geotags, etc. Google photos allows users to caption photos (but captions are not saved), but visitors can no longer see tags.
Still it's the only free online photo management software that has some photo mapping capabilities (again not nearly as good as Picasa)
I'm open to suggestions.
Steve Graves (steve.graves@csun.edu)