Photographs

Special Collections and University Archives maintains over 1,000,000 photographs, slides, and digital images. The majority of these images focus on the activities of faculty, staff, students, and alumni of Iowa State University. The Department also holds separate collections that feature topics related to agriculture, rural life, science, technology, home economics, and local history.

Only a selection of these collections are available online through Digital Collections, however nearly all of them may be viewed by visiting the Department.

Copies may be requested; see the Image Reproduction page for more information. Please allow 2 or more weeks for fulfillment of image requests.

To see if we have photos for the topic you’re interested in, please see the photograph collections page. There you can see if we have photos and how many boxes you will want to search.  You can also see if we have slides.

For example, if you are interested in photos of football, you would click on the University Photographs link, then scroll down or hit ctrl+f to search.

There you can see there are many boxes of football photos. Please let the staff at the desk know if there are particular years or types of photos you are interested in, so we can help narrow it down to exactly what you need.

For manuscript collections, you will want to look at the finding aid for the collection and search “photographs” to see if there are any in the collection.