The Associated Press Archives

The Associated Press

The Associated Press is an independent non-profit global news organization dedicated to factual reporting. Founded in 1846, AP today remains the most trusted source of fast, accurate, unbiased news in all formats and the essential provider of the technology and services vital to the news business.

For 175 years, AP reporters and photographers have ventured the world and risked their lives capturing the most important events in human history.

AP was the first private sector organization in the U.S. to operate on a national scale. Over the past 175 years, AP has been first to inform the world of many of history's most important moments, from the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the fall of the Shah of Iran. Today, AP operates in 250 locations in 100 countries relaying breaking news, covering war and conflict and producing enterprise reports that tell the world's stories.

AP creates: 2,000 stories every day, 1 million photos per year, 70,000 videos per year, and has 1.7 million video clips in its archive.

Photo of a negative from The Associated Press photo archive in New York.

The Photo Archive

AP’s photographic archive is the largest collection of historical and contemporary images in the world. Its primary physical archive is located in New York City and contains in its collection everything from dry plate glass negatives, prints, large and medium format and 35mm. Combined with the current digital archive, in total, AP’s collection is currently at 35 million images and counting.

Beyond the vast numbers, the heart of AP photography has been journalistic excellence. AP’s photography has won 34 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization.

The archive is made up some of the most iconic images of the 21st century. But the archive is vast and beyond its greatest hits -it’s also filled with oddities, undiscovered and never-before seen images. From wars, to daily life, sports figures and politicians, to sweeping late 60s U.S. civil rights photos, anything media was covering at the time is found in these stacks.

The Video Archive

AP’s video archive with over 1.7 million pieces of global news footage of every genre, dating back to 1895 from AP and partners. AP’s journalists cover stories on everything from hard news and politics, to lifestyle, sports and entertainment. AP has regional teams on the ground in 254 locations.

Bard EH Archive Research

Hi EH students,

I look forward to seeing and talking to you all next week.

Although we are not currently able to take a tour of the AP’s archive in its physical form, I wanted to offer a digital solution for the workshop portion of class.

Part of what can activate and create new access points to any archive are the people who engage it: their ideas, interests and own history. My hope for our workshop time is that through our individual investigations, we can learn from each other and question together what we uncover.

In this spirit, please fill out the form below which asks for some basic information but most importantly, what you would like researched from the archive.

Once I have everyone’s research request, I’ll go through the online archives and pull images and videos based on your submissions and place the results online. I will share your results a few days before, so you can look at your research.

During our workshop, we can look through everyone’s results and talk about what we found, questions we might have.

Below the form, you will find an example of a search (by clicking on each photo, you can read the photo caption, made at the time of the image’s capture).

Let me know if you have any questions: ncastaneda@ap.org

Please fill out your search terms for research by Sunday, May 1, 2022.

Student Name

First Name

Last Name

If I have questions about your search or run into issues with results, I'll contact you here.

Which archive would you like searched?

Photo

Moving Image

Would you like your search terms and results shared with the class?

Yes

What search terms would you like researched in AP's Archives?

Please limit search terms to one subject. Keep in mind, the more specific your terms, the more focused your results will be. For example, if "protest" was searched in the archives, there would be many, many results. But if you added a year or a place, this would focus the results.