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Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Photographs of veterans number in the thousands within the collections of the Library of Congress. We can see the faces of veterans of wars fought in foreign lands and in our own backyards. We have photographs of veterans who fought in wars in the last century – and the one before that – as well …
Posted in: Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
If every collection in the Prints and Photographs Division is an apple tree, full of tantalizing visual treats, then all of our holdings combined make for a vast orchard, ripe with possibility. My extended food metaphor is no accident, as we are launching a new monthly series here at Picture This entitled Feast Your Eyes. …
Posted in: Cartoons, Photographs, Posters, Prints, Series: Feast Your Eyes
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: Jeff Bridgers
This September 1924 National Photo Company image of an auto house caught my eye not only because of the delight it sparked in seeing such a novel vehicle, but also because the lack of contextual information set me to wondering and wanting to know more. For example, assuming that the photo shows Mr. Harris and …
Posted in: Photographs, Series: Caught Our Eyes
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
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. August 30, 2013 marks the 150th birthday for the master of early color photography in Russia–Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944). The Prokudin-Gorskii Collection at the Library of Congress features color photographic surveys of the vast Russian Empire made primarily between 1909 and …
Posted in: Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. Some 250,000 people, both white and black, crowded onto the National Mall on August 28, 1963, to demand civil rights for African Americans. It was the largest demonstration the city had seen—The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The concluding …
Posted in: African American History, News & Events, Photographs