The police mug shot -- that staple of tabloid life -- was in its infancy in the late 19th century. The U.S. Secret Service, charged with investigating counterfeiting rings but lacking photo equipment, took their arrested suspects to formal portrait studios to have photos taken and then added to their case files. The Library preserves more than 1,200 of these. They offer a marvelous glimpse at how we lived and looked in days gone by.
The photographer John Margolies chronicled the weird and wonderful ways American businesses advertised themselves along the nation's roadways in the latter half of the 20th century. He felt dinosaur-shaped gas stations and a giant gunslinging shrimp advertising a restaurant weren't just roadside kitsch but a genuine expression of the national identity. The Library preserves more than 11,000 of his images.
—This is a guest post by Adam M. Silvia, a curator in the Prints and Photographs Division. As a photojournalist, Taro Yamasaki photographed at-risk children in the United States and around the world — Nicaragua, Bosnia, Rwanda, the Middle East. The Prints and Photographs Division recently acquired three collections that document such work by the …
The Library’s Free to Use and Reuse sets of photographs and prints are copyright-free, yours to use anyway you like. This set of winter photos offers a window in the worlds of lost arts of ice harvesting, snowshoe-making and finally, the society set of snowbirds in Palm Beach, Florida, in the 1950s.
