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Archive: 2012 (57 Posts)

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Caught Our Eyes: Most Original Costume

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

Still trying to decide about your costume for Halloween? Torn between a witch or a princess? An astronaut or a librarian? (Surely someone out there was going to dress as a librarian?) Throw out all those ideas because I have the solution! Amaze your friends and family by arriving at your Halloween festivities (or even …

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New for You: Presidential Campaign Posters Book

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. The creative staff members in the Library of Congress Publishing Office produce fascinating new books each year by digging deeply into our remarkable collections, aided by Prints & Photographs Division staff. The recently issued volume, Presidential Campaign Posters from the Library …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

From Player Portraits to Baseball Cards

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

With the World Series just around the bend, baseball has been on my mind. In 1910, photographer Paul Thompson copyrighted a series of photographic portraits he had taken of baseball players. The portraits are simple straight-on head-and-shoulders shots with the players gazing directly back at the camera. These same portraits would serve as the basis …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

A Yak by Any Other Name: Meet the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

Fishbowls, Whittling, Email, and Ice cream parlors.  What could those four terms possibly have in common?  It turns out they are all recent additions to the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM). Which naturally leads to the question:  What is the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials? Briefly, TGM is a tool for indexing visual materials, both by …

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A Summer of Sharing

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

We mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we’d be playing a game called “What’s My Title?” at the National Book Festival (Sept. 22-23). I can testify that it was wildly successful–and great fun. Hundreds of people stopped by to look at the five popular photographs we mounted on a wall, and many accepted the …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Caught Our Eyes: Fashion Flashback

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

Earlier this month, New York City’s catwalks were filled with the latest creations from the world of fashion during the biannual ritual of Fashion Week. At the same time, I was searching in the George Grantham Bain Collection while answering a reference question and came across this stylish photograph. How could I resist stopping to …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

The National Book Festival – please join us!

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

The Prints & Photographs Division will be on hand at this weekend’s National Book Festival (Sept. 22-23).  If you’re planning on attending, please look for us in the LC Pavilion. Our focus will be “reading photographs,” and we’re inviting visitors to participate in a photo captioning game called “What’s My Title?” We’ll be displaying a …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Antietam: Can One Picture Tell the Story?

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. If you had to pick just one picture to represent the Battle of Antietam, which would you choose? A photograph of a young girl wearing mourning ribbons and holding a photograph of her father could symbolize the wide-spread and lasting losses …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Caught Our Eyes: Better with Butter

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

Reading the caption for a photograph can sometimes change every assumption made at first glance. One word in the title of this photograph shifted my entire view, and definitely caught my eye. Look at the image yourself, and then read the full title as it was written on the back of this stereograph card. The …