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Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Who can appreciate clear skies more than Santa? This 1927 Harris & Ewing photograph documents Santa receiving rather than giving: he gets the “all clear” to navigate the skies on Christmas Eve, complete with a pilot’s license. While a pilot’s license may not be on everyone’s wish list, anyone who has worked with historical photographs …
Posted in: Photographs, Series: Caught Our Eyes
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The following is a guest post by Katherine Blood, Curator of Fine Prints, Prints and Photographs Division. One of the joys of working with the Library’s vast and varied collections is the potential for making extraordinary discoveries. This is one of those stories. Please help us welcome a new treasure to the Prints & Photographs …
Posted in: Drawings, News & Events
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. Which photographs do you consider “great”? I’d especially like to hear which images stand out in your mind’s eye, because I was recently challenged to define greatness for a new compilation of more than 700 fascinating pictures that represent the breadth …
Posted in: News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Tomorrow many households in the U.S. will be celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday. Holidays–particularly food-centered ones–conjure up many personal associations. They also tend to inspire evocative pictures. Turkey in many shapes and forms predominate in the array of images that turn up when you search the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog for “Thanksgiving.” But my family …
Posted in: Drawings, Posters, Prints, Series: Feast Your Eyes
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
You may recall that last President’s Day, members of the public enjoyed a rare treat—and recorded it with their cameras. Twice each year, the Library of Congress offers a public open house in the Main Reading Room of the Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C. The space is not normally open to photographers, but cameras …
Posted in: Architecture, Flickr, News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
As we near Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday on Oct. 27th, we have ongoing cause for celebration. A project to broaden access to images relating to Roosevelt’s life and times is putting new digital images and descriptions online each week. Last year, the project brought us illustrations from Puck magazine, including this visual jab at Roosevelt’s positive …
Posted in: Cartoons, Photographs, Prints
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
How can one ever come to understand a collection of 170,000 pictures? If you read my post a few weeks ago about finding unprinted Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) photographs, you probably quickly realized that the collection is complex, consisting of many interrelated parts. I hope you also got a sense of the …
Posted in: FSA/OWI, Photographs, Visual literacy
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The following is a guest post by Donna Lacy Collins, Photo Preservation Specialist, Prints & Photographs Division. An exciting part of working with the Library’s collections is finding unexpected and curious images. When I discovered this picture in the Arnold Genthe archive of photographic negatives, labeled simply “Cornish bird masque,” I knew I had to …
Posted in: Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
I started out this week to reflect on the joys of summer with one of our “Caught Our Eyes” posts. It also turned out to be a fine opportunity to celebrate the results of a recent project to improve access to the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) Collection of photographs from the Depression …
Posted in: FSA/OWI, News & Events, Photographs