National Geographic Image Collection, a division of National Geographic Partners headquartered in Washington, D.C., United States, is National Geographic's photography, video, and talent agency representing award-winning content creators with over 10 million images and works of art. The National Geographic Image Collection represents over one hundred photographers making them available for advertising, editorial, and corporate assignments. Its tens of millions of images capture the planet as explored by scientists, adventurers, writers, and photographers, from the 19th century through today. The men who founded the National Geographic Society in 1888 did not aspire to create a world-class photo archive; at that time, photography was more the province of pulp publications than scholarly journals. But photographers with interesting images began bringing them to National Geographic: Photographer George Shiras came to the magazine's Washington, D.C., offices with about 1,000 shots of wild animals at night, which he had lit by mounting a flash on the bow of his canoe. Some Society board members thought that photos were so lowbrow that in 1906, after the magazine published Shiras's pioneering shots, two board members resigned in disgust. But Society president Alexander Graham Bell and magazine editor Gilbert H. Grosvenor embraced the use of photos, which ever since have been at the core of the magazine's identity and mission. As early 20th-century explorers and contributors traveled the world, they made images or purchased them from local sources and brought them to National Geographic. The photos formed unruly heaps on editors’ desks—until 1919 when the Illustrations Library was established. Meticulous librarians cataloged every photograph and artwork, filing them with typed field notes and organizing them geographically: first by continent, then country, then city, and finally by photographer. For 96 of its 100 years, the Image Collection has been headed by a woman. The Image Collection's dedication to preserving history through photographs has made it an invaluable resource, and an essential reference to vanishing worlds. Governments, curators, and academics often find in our archive the only photographic record of a nation's early history, a lost culture, or an extinct species. The archive houses important images made by a Who's Who of photographers: 20th-century shooters such as Margaret Bourke-White, Mary Ellen Mark, Ansel Adams, and Alfred Eisenstaedt, as well as the leading photographers today. It's also a visual record of some of humanity's greatest achievements: Amelia Earhart's flights and Jacques Cousteau's dives, Jane Goodall's findings about chimpanzee behavior and Bob Ballard's discovery of the wreck of the Titanic.
Collection overview
A vault at National Geographic's headquarters holds 11.5 million physical objects: photographs, transparencies, negatives, albums, glass plates, and autochromes, the first form of color photography. The film collection includes 500,000 films and videos. And the digital collection stores almost 50 million images on servers, with roughly 190,000 added to the archives every year. The archive's oldest photographs, circa 1870, are by William Henry Jackson, famous for his images of railroads and western U.S. landscapes. Every addition to the Image Collection tells a piece of our world's story and furthers Alexander Graham Bell's mission for National Geographic: to illuminate “the world and all that is in it.”
