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Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
As the previous “Words About Pictures” blog post demonstrated, street scenes can offer considerable matter for interpretation. Not only do they show exteriors, but they stir thoughts about interiors: what might be going on inside the buildings or the people depicted? Here’s an image that brings interior and exterior together in an interesting way and …
Posted in: News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Historic news photographs offer an immediacy and perspective on past events that make them among the most popularly requested items in our collections. The Prints & Photographs Division’s New York World-Telegram & the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection is a case in point. Consisting of an estimated one million photographs that the newspaper assembled between …
Posted in: News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
In a previous post (“Still Feeling the Glow: Photo Guessing Game at the National Book Festival,” Oct. 26), we described how we brought copies of photographs from Prints & Photographs Division collections to the National Book Festival in September and asked visitors to participate in a “guessing game.” We showed the pictures first with no …
Posted in: News & Events, Photographs, Visual literacy
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The author signing lines have long disappeared and the tents have come down, but we are still reveling in the pleasures of sharing photos and ideas about photos at the National Book Festival last month (Sept. 24-25). We had hundreds of people stop by our table in the Library of Congress Pavilion to try our …
Posted in: News & Events, Photographs, Visual literacy
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Explore the faces, places and events of the U.S. Civil War in a single online location, using a new feature in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. The “Civil War” category aids research across thousands of images relating to the Civil War that are found in different Prints & Photographs Division collections in a variety …
Posted in: Drawings, News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Recently I had one of those days when Prints & Photographs Division collections intersected with my personal life. I came home to an exclamation from my daughter, who was trolling the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog for a school assignment: “Mom, the Office of War Information photographed my high school during World War II!” The …
Posted in: Flickr, News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
What’s the date of this photo? Take your best guess, and then I’ll mention some clues I pursued. The photo shows the busy catalog card distribution office at the Library of Congress. There’s no date on the photographic print. Recently, we needed to determine when the photo was taken, so out came my magnifying glass. …
Posted in: Photographs, Posters, Visual literacy