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...Home > Services > Newsletter > Lizard Index > 2002-2003 Issues > Using Associated Press Photos in Teaching

Using Associated Press Photos in Teaching

By Ben Crow, Assistant Professor, Sociology, with crucial support from Sheryl Martin-Schultz, Instructional Development Specialist, Media Services

Since the beginning of the year I have been using images from the Associated Press (AP) Photo Archive in my teaching. Students and faculty now have access to this huge online archive of news photos almost comparable to that of a newspaper editor. It is an amazing resource with which to increase the immediacy, international scale, and visual depth of student learning.

When I wanted to find examples of air pollution in the Third World for my course Nature, Poverty, and Progress, I went to the archive. I discovered pictures showing that there had been riots over the last few days in Delhi because the Indian Supreme Court had implemented a decree that city buses should run only on natural gas. Traffic was at a standstill, and frustrated passengers had set light to buses. The photo captions told the story in brief with careful references to time and place. I had not known about these events. The AP photos, and others of pollution in Santiago, Chile, and elsewhere, gave immediacy and weight to the topic we were studying that day.

How do you get these photos? Go to the Library Web page. Look under Electronic Resources for Pictures and Images. Then choose Accunet AP Photo Archive. The site can also be reached directly. Once there, enter the archive and type the chosen topic in the “What, When, or Where” fields (as appropriate). Click “Search” and wait patiently for the results. The default offers 12 images at a time, but changing the “Display Images” setting will allow you to see four larger images or a directory listing descriptions of all the relevant images. Two small red arrows in the left column allow navigation from page to page. Viewers can also sort images by relevancy or newness and access different archives. Access to the photo archive is free to faculty and students from a computer on the university network, or from those logging in using the library proxy.

Sheryl Martin-Schultz of Media Services taught me how to import images into Power Point. It’s easy. Select “Insert,” go to “Picture” and “From File.” Choose the saved image and insert it. Once it is placed in the slide, you can move and resize it. Graphic instructions for this and other procedures can be found online.

There is a remarkable range of images in the archive. Earlier this week, I showed another class images of the resumption of World Food Program aid distribution in Kabul, Afghanistan. The picture had been taken earlier the same day. When I wanted pictures of the Bretton Woods negotiations that established the IMF and the World Bank, there were pictures of gray-suited white males sitting round a huge elliptical table. When I wanted to find famous sociologists, I found a picture of E. Franklin Frazier, the author of a book, controversial in 1957 when it was published, The Black Bourgeoisie, sitting in his office at Howard University. When I looked up my current research on water and gender relations, I discovered pictures of women protesting about water supplies in different parts of the world. Those protests have not been documented by academics, even though AP photographers in different regions have deemed them news.

Copyright? AP has made the photos available for classroom use. The California Digital Library is paying the license fee for the first year. In subsequent years, the UCSC library may be asked to pick up part of the tab. Fair Use rules apply, so inclusion in a password-protected Web page is okay. Open Web pages and papers published for commercial journals may require payment of a fee to the Associated Press.

Students can also use these photos in their papers or presentations. The AP Photo Archive is in this respect more liberal than most databases, I learned from Christine Bunting in McHenry Library. Use in student papers is encouraged. If students find the discovery of relevant pictures as exciting as I have, this could be a wonderful resource for them.

How is the archive structured? There are three databases. One is international photos. That is the one I have mostly used. A second is photos from Europe and Asia. I have not used that much. The third contains AP graphics. It’s not bad for getting maps and charts of events in the news. But I find I can get better maps just by searching with Google and better charts from The Economist and other newspaper Web pages.

This archive has kept me up late at night, poring over fascinating images. A friend from UC Davis has been establishing a photo archive on the Nuremburg Trials. She was amazed to find that I could instantly download pictures for which she had searched many hours. Like my friend, many of our students may not know about this amazing resource. When they do, I think we will be getting some astonishing visual material in student papers.