About the Project
The American Landscape Project is a free online archive of photographic images, post cards, and travel ephemera documenting both ordinary and extraordinary landscapes from around the world.
The intial collections were all photographic slides photographed for instructional and personal use by academic geographers Ralph Pierce and Donald Kress. Their collections were "saved" from the dumpster in the late 1990s and early 2000s during a time of rapid changeover to digital-only classroom imagery. Those collections were added to curator Steve Graves' modest collection built during his time in graduate school in the waning pre-digital era.
The early collections were largely US-focused, and reflected both the academic interests, and tourist behaviors of three broadly-trained geographers.
In the intervening years, additional collections of photographic slides have been added by generous donors, many of whom sought a safe storage option for impressive numbers of photographic slides that were not of interest to libraries or other public archives.
All are housed in a climate and dust-controlled archival space at California State University, Northridge alongside hundreds of Sanborn Fire Atlases. A small staff of volunteers maintains the collection, working to convert the slides, postcards, and travel ephemera to digital files that can be shared with the wider public and researchers alike.
This website serves as a public gateway to the collections that cannot be adquately housed or shared via computer servers at California State University, Northridge
