Photography, simply put, is both visual art and social document. Despite the stillness of the fixed image, few can deny photography's impact—sometimes subtle, other times forceful. The following selection of online resources, exhibitions and collections is meant to provide a range of the quality and character of photography, from its beginnings to the present day.

For an overview of the subject—in addition to a glossary on photographic processes and materials—read the introductory essay on "Photography" in the Grove Dictionary of Art Online www.groveart.com/shared/views/article.html?section=art.067117.1.

The AMICO Library http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/lml/e-resources/amico.html, by contrast, is a good place to view the expressive range of the medium itself—everything from the earliest of daguerreotypes to the photographic works of such contemporary artists as Lorna Simpson and Sharon Lockhart. An AMICO advanced search by type using the term photographs, for example, will retrieve more than 4,000 high-resolution images from the collections of many of North America's finest art museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Besides specialized, full-image databases like AMICO, there also are a growing number of museums, libraries and archives that provide direct online access to their institution's own photographic holdings. The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/pphome.html is one site that offers a survey of American photography.

At the Getty Museum, there are two convenient and fascinating ways to discover the museum's vast collections on photography. Try looking through the A to Z Artist Index www.getty.edu/art/collections/art_artists.html or Collection Types List www.getty.edu/art/collections/collection_types/c260.html to locate a wealth of visual materials. You may be surprised to find that there are 70 digitized images alone on the work of French photographer Eugène Atget www.getty.edu/art/collections/bio/a1763-1.html.

Also worth exploring is an online exhibition titled Picturing the Century www.nara.gov/exhall/picturing_the_century/, which commemorates 100 years of photography at the National Archives and Records Administration. The site is arranged by chronological galleries, as well as by portfolios on the work of seven American masters, including Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams and Danny Lyon. The complete exhibition catalogue also is available in print at Lockwood Memorial Library (LML TR6.U6 W18 1999). Or consider browsing the many photographic exhibitions at the University of California at Riverside's California Museum of Photography www.cmp.ucr.edu/.

And, finally, to learn more about key events in the evolution of the photographic arts and technologies, be sure to visit the George Eastman House Timeline of Photography www.eastman.org/5_timeline/5_index.html.