Photographs have become one of the most important formats for documenting the human experience. And George Mason University's Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) offers world-class collections of photographs for research and exhibitions. They are an ever-growing part of SC&A's collections, now made even more accessible through images in SC&A's Digitized Collections website on the Internet.

Photograph collections in SC&A include the following:

Oliver F. Atkins (1916-1977), one of mid-century America's most prolific photograpers, was born February 18, 1917 in Hyde Park, Massachusetts. Beginning as a staff photographer and later chief photographer for the Birmingham Post, he moved to Washington where he worked for the Washington Daily News from 1940 to 1942. During WW II, he served as a correspondent and photographer for the American Red Cross. After the war, Atkins joined the staff of the Saturday Evening Post where he photographed many important leaders of the United States and the world. Among them were Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Winston Churchill, Gamel Nasser, Krushchev, Tito, and Nehru. In 1969, Atkins became the personal photographer of President Richard M. Nixon and chief White House photographer. Of his many images of Nixon, the series documenting the meeting of December 18, 1970 with Elvis Presley is the most famous and the most requested. The Collection contains over 50,000 images of American political and cultural history spanning the years 1948 to 1974.

Broadside Photograph Collection. Over 2,000 photographs taken between 1975 and 1997. Topics in the collection include: images of the campus; student organizations; university sports; campus events; university administrative units; personalities; featured entertainers; restaurants; and arts. The majority of the images are in black-and-white. Total volume of the collection is 2.3 cubic feet or 3.5 linear feet.

Federal Theatre Project Photographs number 3,000 offical photographs and over 8,700 negatives documenting the work of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). The FTP was a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program designed to put unemployed actors, writers, and other theater personnel to work in their chosen fields during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Collection spans FTP's beginning in 1936 through its end in 1939. Taken by official WPA photographers, the photographs feature such subjects as FTP plays, portraits of casts and crews, audiences, equipment, stages, and costumes.

Arthur E. Scott (1913-1977), widely known as "Scotty" on Capitol Hill, first covered the United States Congress in 1935 as a photographer for the Washington Times. Later, he worked for International News Service and United Press International. In 1955, he became the photographer for the Republican Senatorial Committee where he served for the next twenty years. During his last year with the U.S. Senate, he was the official photo-historian for the Senate Historical Office. There he set to work on a project he had advocated for many years - collecting a likeness of every person who had served as a United States senator. His collection reflects the entire forty-years of Scott's association with Congress. It features over 3,500 photographs and negatives of United States Senators, Congress, the Capitol, and its surroundings dating from the mid-1930s to the 1970s.

Charles Baptie (1914-  ), photographer, printer, and publisher, was born in Munhall, Pennsylvania on March 13, 1914. As photographer and public relations person for Capital Airlines, Baptie recorded the life of the airline for many years. When Capital Airlines merged with United Airlines, he left the company and formed his own business, Charles Baptie Studios. Since that time, Baptie has photographically illustrated more than fifty books and other publications, such as Capital Airlines: A Nostalgic Flight Into the Past; Great Houses of Washington; Camera on Assignment (with Ollie Atkins); a sixteen-volume Encyclopedia of United States History; Guest House of the Presidents; a story on the Blair Lee House; and Mid the Hills of Pennsylvania. As a photo-journalist he covered feature stories for leading magazines and Sunday supplements, where he met and photographed many of the world's leaders and notables. The Collection contains over 4,000 photographic images.

Reston Times Negative Collection features over 7,500, 35-mm negatives of published and unpublished photographs taken by journalists from the Reston Times newspaper. The Collection spans the years 1970-1980. Because Reston is one of the world's most successful and historic planned communities on a comprehensive scale, there is keen interest in the photographs by architects, historians, and developers. Subjects include Reston, VA places, personalities, and events.

Special Collections & Archives preserves and makes available to all students, faculty, and researchers many kinds of original and scholarly materials. Subject areas in SC&A include Northern Virginiana, Planned Communities, Congressional Papers, Performing Arts, Maps, the Civil War, and George Mason University. Formats in SC&A include manuscripts, photographs, rare books, playbills, musical scores, audio and videotapes, architectural drawings, and slides.