About

Old Negatives is a small personal project: a place to look at early American color photography at full size, without watermarks, sign-up walls or endless scrolling.

The frames come from the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information color collection at the Library of Congress. Between 1939 and 1944 a handful of photographers carried Kodachrome alongside their black-and-white cameras. The color work was little seen for decades; today it is in the public domain.

Each frame here is grouped into a "roll" by region, cleaned up a little, and offered as a full-resolution download. Titles are shortened from the original captions; the source link on every page goes to the full record.

New rolls are added when there is time. If a caption is wrong or you know more about a place, the source pages on Wikimedia Commons are the right place to correct it.