University Photograph Collection

About

This collection includes over 1,000,000 photographic images of the university, its faculty, staff, and students. The earliest materials in this collection were accumulated as part of the Iowa State History Collection in the 1940s and 1950s. This original collection was greatly enlarged by the transfer of the photograph archives of the Photo Services Unit in the 1990s. Over the years, the collection was supplemented with contributions from individual donors, other campus units, and Special Collections and University Archives staff. The vast majority of images are black and white.

Access

Along with the highlighted collections, photographs may be found throughout SCUA's collections in scrapbooks and alongside paper records. Search CARDinal for more information.

Selected images from SCUA's collections are available online in our Digital Collections. Non-digitized images are available for viewing in our Reading Room.

Learn about how you can create or request reproductions of images from SCUA's collections for use in various ways.

Search tips

To locate images of interest in the University Photograph Collection, please use the Find Function in your computer's browser on this web page to search the tables below.

Individual faculty, staff, and administrators can be located by looking through photographs related to the departments in which they worked or those with which they were most often identified. The university presidents are an exception, and are listed individually.

Organization

The photo collection uses the same record group system as the University Archives. Due to the frequent requests for images of buildings, each building is listed separately.

• Presidents
• Buildings
• Academic, Administrative, and Research Units
• Athletics
• Student and Faculty Groups, Alumni, and General Topics

Presidents

This series lists the University Presidents that are included in the photograph collection. In addition, there are several boxes with images of the presidents' families and office staff.

Buildings

This series lists all former and current buildings that are included in the photograph collection. For most buildings, interior and exterior shots are available. Folders titled "Campus Scenes" and "Aerial Views" typically highlight more than one building in the photograph.

Academic, Administrative, and Research Units

This series lists campus units that are represented in the collection. For each department, there may be photographs of faculty and staff, classroom scenes, and administrative activities. In some instances, there are examples of laboratory equipment, animals and livestock, and machinery used by the department. The series is listed alphabetically by title.

Athletics

These images contain individual and team photos, scenes from athletic events, and some casual shots of athletes and coaches. Photos from the Office of the Director of Athletics are listed first, followed by the Business manager's office, coaches and trainers, and each sport alphabetically thereafter.

Student and Faculty Groups, Alumni, and General Topics

This series contains images of faculty and student groups such as VEISHEA and homecoming, governance bodies for both faculty (Faculty Senate) and students (Student Government), alumni and former students including Jack Trice, George Washington Carver, and Carrie Chapman Catt, and general topics such as campus art, campus flooding, and student protests.