HomeUsing This Site

Using This Site

This new software the Gallery runs on gives you a lot of flexibility in searching for and viewing photo images by event, name, topic, title, and many other ways. When you access our home page, you will see drop-down menus for “Exhibits," “ICG Collections,” and “Contributor Collections."

The “Exhibits” are where you will find where the archivists have created groupings of photos by topic. These images are gathered together from the entire Gallery. This is your best bet for viewing all photos from a particular event, no matter who took them. This is we are working to have exhibits by convention name and year. There are hundreds of possibilities here, since we can create special feature selections by costume type, artist, subject, title, and many other categories. We’re very excited to explore this feature in the future – we do not have this fully implemented yet – it takes time to put them together.

The “ICG Collections” are (mostly) official masquerade photos gathered by the archivists. It is here that all photographs can be found by event name. Photos under each event name are listed in alphabetical order only.

The “Contributed Collections” are pictures donated by people who took the photos themselves or collected from others. Again, these photos are listed by title in alphabetical order.

If you’re wanting to find a particular image or event that we have not created an exhibit for yet, (or you just don’t want to look through 200+ pages of photos listed alphabetically), you can use the “Search The Collections” drop-down menu. Here, you can narrow down your search to filter out results. For instance, at this moment, putting in “Snow Queen” in the Keyword field returned 36 results from across the site.

One other note about searching - while we frequently can identify the Subject--who is in the image--we don't always know for certain who the Creator of the costume is (the designer), and less often who definitely made the costume (we don't want to make assumptions when we haven't been explicitly told). You'll have your best luck searching for people's names in the Subject field, or a simple keyword search.

Once you’ve chosen either an event or a Contributed Collection to view, you will see a list of photo thumbnails with titles. Clicking that thumbnail, it will take you to the data page. On the upper right of that page, you will see the thumbnail again. Clicking the thumbnail will open a larger image you can zoom in on.

Potential Nudity and Sensitive Materials

Just a prudent warning to the visitor: There are some pictures, particularly from the 1950s – 1970s, that are revealing or may contain nudity, but they are in the context of a costume. If you are a concerned parent, please be aware of this. We do not censor the photos, nor have we separated them into one folder.

The online collections of the International Costumers’ Guild Pat and Peggy Kennedy Memorial Library are made accessible to the public as a record of science fiction fan and historical costuming. Some materials may contain offensive images, language, or other content. These records document a time and place in history, serving as a portrayal of the social mindsets and occurrences of their time. They do not mirror the current views of the ICG, which seeks to encourage a vibrant and diverse community.