Fortepan IA

Fortepan Iowa features curated photos taken by ordinary Iowans over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The photos represent the personal, whimsical, poetic, significant, and accidentally artistic moments of everyday Iowa life, and tell a rich story of Iowa’s great diversity and complexity.

The project serves as an ever-growing public website, providing opportunities for deep reflection on who we are as a State. Our aim is to find and digitize evocative archival photographs taken by everyday Iowans—photographs that might disappear or be thrown away—and organize them into an easily searchable visual chronology, with other functionalities that help you browse through, tag, geo-locate, and download the images.