More than 1,000 photographs were donated this past year to the J. Paul Getty Museum, making the museum's 25th year a record-breaking one for donations.

The quantity of donations was due in part to a special initiative led in 2009 by Getty Photographs Council member Dan Solomon, who began collecting photographs for the anniversary.

With these new contributions, the museum now possesses works from new artists such as Gilles Peress, Robert Polidori, Liza Ryan, Brian Ulrich, Peter Wagner and Pinar Yolacan, as well as artists already featured in the museum, such as Eileen Cowan, John Divola and Chris Jordan.

These photographs will be featured in one of the Getty's newest wings, the Center for Photographs, which opened in 2006.

An active member of the J. Paul Getty Museum since 1986, Judith Keller was recently named senior curator of photographs at the Los Angeles-based museum. Keller has been the acting head of the department since January 2009, following the retirement of the department's founding curator, Weston Naef.

Keller's achievements at the museum include more than 20 exhibitions and 10 publications, including...

Life magazine's 160 years of photo archives became available, for free, on March 31 after a two-year project to digitize the publication's expansive photo collection.

Life.com, the online photo archive created by Getty Images and Time Inc., launched with more than 7 million images and plans to add 3,000 new images every day. The database features images from both the Life and Getty photo databases. The expansive collection includes unseen galleries, such as photos from the night of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination; only 3 percent of the images have been previously viewed by the public...

AP Images, the photo licensing branch of the Associated Press (AP), has won a multi-year contract to secure commercial licensing rights to images of National Football League games. Getty Images had possessed the rights since 2004.

This is the second sports deal finalized by AP Images this year, a contract with the NCAA was inked in February for commercial distribution rights of championship photos. AP also owns editorial licensing rights for all sports images...

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has received gifts of nearly 500 pieces to its Department of Photographs since last year. The contributions came from more than 25 individual donors, including collectors, artists' estates and members of the Getty's Photographs Council.

The gifts included two photographs by Liu Zheng from his recent Peking Opera series, the first contemporary Chinese works to enter the Getty Museum's collection. The Getty has also augmented its already strong holdings of prints from Mexican photographers by adding works by Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Graciela Iturbide...