We live in an age, we’re often told, when our ability to conjure up an image is limited only by our imagination. These days, this notion tends to refer to artificial intelligence-powered systems that generate visual material from text prompts, like DALL‑E and the many others that have proliferated in its wake. But however technologically impressive they are, they also reveal that our imagination has its limits, giving form only to what we can put into words. To be inspired properly again, we must explore farther afield, in the visual realms of other times and places, which we can easily do on a site like Public.work.
Jason Kottke describes Public.work as “an image search engine that boasts 100,000 ‘copyright-free’ images from institutions like the NYPL, the Met, etc. It’s fast with a relatively simple interface and uses AI to auto-categorize and suggest possibly related images (both visually and content-wise). And it’s fun to just visually click around on related images.”
These journeys can take you from vintage magazine covers to foreign children’s books, lifelike foreign landscapes to elaborate world maps, Japanese woodblock prints to roadside Americana — or such has been my experience, at any rate.
“On the downside,” Kottke adds, “their sourcing and attribution isn’t great — especially when compared to something like Flickr Commons.” According to librarian Jessamyn West, Public.work isn’t exactly a search engine, but an interface for a site called Cosmos, which describes itself as “a Pinterest alternative for creatives” meant to create “a more mindful internet.”
Getting the full story behind any particular images you find there will require you to put a bit of energy into research, or at least to locate the fruits of research done elsewhere on the internet. As for what you do with them, that will, of course, depend on your own creative instincts. Enter Public.work here.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
