Websites
Duke University: Center for Documentary Studies
http://www-cds.aas.duke.edu/
Duke University's Center for Documentary studies offers an array of resources. Especially interesting is the Online Multimedia Gallery.
FineArt
http://fineart.ac.uk/home/
"Fineart.ac.uk is a prototype for a national web-based collection of work by staff and students of UK higher education institutions who have made a significant contribution to UK fine art education through practice."
It is a small collection (around 200 images) and geographically tied to U.K. authors, predominantly painters. It is useful to be able to search not only by author and location, but by the timeline as well.
George Eastman House
http://www.geh.org/
The George Eastman House site offers access to several collections of photography online, indexed by photographers, topics, images of technologies, etc. Although this "digital image sampler" doesn't have a search engine, it is possible to search the authors alphabetically, or scroll down the menu with themes.
Getty Museum: Explore Art
http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/
This is probably one of the larger art-related databases. The collection is searchable by author and includes many of the more famous photographers. The section on
Photography
has a good historical overview of this form of art.
International Center of Photography
http://www.icp.org/index.html
The site promises a searchable database, but it is not easily located -- if in operation at all (yet!). It is, nevertheless, worth checking out.
Museum of Modern Art: Photography
http://www.moma.org/collection/depts/photography/index.html
MOMA's collection of photographs has breadth if not quantity. It is worth browsing and searching this site to see what other information one might get on a selected artist.
The National Museum of Women in the Arts
http://www.nmwa.org/
"The only museum in the world dedicated exclusively to recognizing the contributions of women artists. In the pages that follow you will discover a wealth of information about the museum, selected artists, our collection, and many services. You may choose to examine images of works from our permanent collection. Artist profiles feature the lives of selected women artists and corresponding bibliographies lead you to new sources of information."
To access the digitized collection of artworks, click on Search.
Profotos.com: Photography Masters
http://www.profotos.com/education/referencedesk/masters/
Very much time and care has gone into creating this collection, which includes some of the biggest names (earlier and current) in photography. The collection is part of a website that offers hands-on photography advice and product promotions.
UC Berkeley: ImageFinder
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/ImageFinder/#Arch
The UC Berkeley Architecture Visual Resources Library is probably the best place to search, but other databases in this gateway should be searched as well (unfortunately one by one, for now...) One should search by photographer's name. There might not be very much biographical data, but it offers important images from some of the most famous photographers. Please follow the instructions (last name, first name) for optimal results.
