Inside the curated image collection spanning 2,000 years of visual history – that you can use for free

Not all of us enjoy spending hours trawling through hefty archives of text, films, audio and images, but lucky for us, there’s a handful of people that do. Like for the editor and publisher Adam Green, for example. For Adam it’s a laborious but rewarding task – one that he describes as “archive spelunking”, a term borrowed from the strange and surprising hobby of exploring caves. It’s an effective metaphor, because archives can be dark and cavernous too: rich with treasures, but difficult to navigate without knowledge or guidance.

For over a decade, Adam has been sifting through digital caves, re-publishing strange, beautiful, and forgotten treasures from visual and literary archives in an online journal: The Public Domain Review (PDR). Since its founding in 2011, PDR has grown into a three-person operation, with managing editor Hunter Dukes and web developer Brian Jones. Focusing on out-of-copyright material that’s fallen into the public domain, the team continues to publish essays, audio clippings, poems, and more, including the equally curious images unearthed with them.

A little while ago, Adam recognised that the PDR has “quietly served as a kind of digital art gallery”. He realised that the journal was brimming with visuals that were just as intriguing as the material they illustrated, and so the the team launched a brand new project: The Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA). “We’re freeing the images from their textual homes and gathering them into one easily accessible database,” says Adam, who sees this new database as a “best of” selection from the hundreds of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums sharing their collections online. “It’s like a small exhibition gallery at the entrance to an immense network of archives that lie beyond.”

Woodblock prints, calligraphy, gelatin photographs and maps of the world – these are just a few of the curiosities among over 10,000 meticulously tagged and categorised items. Users can explore the website in multiple ways. The sprawling ‘infinite view’ launches a 360-degree scrollable layout, while ‘shuffle view’ generates random combinations of images. Users can also simply search by era, theme, style, or colour. For artists and designers, it could be the starting point for visual references; for a writer, the beginning of a new story – but for Adam, “a really good use for the archive is just the pure joy of discovery”, he says. “A kind of aimless but attentive wandering, jumping down rabbit holes at will, one leading to the other.”

Both the PDR and the PDIA are part of a recent surge of interest in archives and visual history on the internet. This is partly due to museums, galleries and libraries digitising vast portions of their collections, says Adam. “Previously, such institutions were only able to show a fraction of their collections in their physical space, now they can show all of it – on the scale of millions rather than thousands.”

This shift has transformed how we access and engage with visual history – academically, but also on a personal level. “Image-sharing has become such a huge part of how we socialise online,” Adam comments. At the same time, he also has a theory that our fixation on the past reflects something deeper about the state of society. “In this phase of late-capitalism we’re in, with the promised-future failing to materialise, people turn to the past, and culture becomes excessively nostalgic.”

Adam’s theorising rings true, especially in a time when AI is dominating conversations around creative tools. In many ways, the PDIA is a counterweight to the direction technology is heading. “If people are needing to use images to illustrate articles for free, for example, here’s an alternative to AI, which is so energy intensive and, so often, aesthetically dubious,” says Adam. “We hope the archive will remind people just how rich and brilliant our visual history is, and how much of it is available in digitised form – entirely free to use.”