Top of page
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
In the latest installment of our occasional series on challenging photography, Anything to Get the Shot, I’m going to highlight one of the more dangerous choices a photographer can make: covering war. Photographers during the U.S. Civil War faced serious challenges in their work. Due to the size of the camera equipment and long exposure …
Posted in: Photographs, Posters, Series: Anything to Get the Shot
Posted by: Jeff Bridgers
It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other in any game of cards or dice, dominoes or checkers. –Birmingham, Alabama, 1930. “Jim Crow” laws systematically codified separation by race in the American South. Although it had begun some years before and persisted for some …
Posted in: African American History, Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
A log cabin, a city row house, and a Baptist church. As a list of buildings, it is unremarkable. When I describe these three structures with a focus on their places in history, the list gets much more interesting. They are also: the slave quarters on the Tennessee plantation owned by Pres. Andrew Jackson, the …
Posted in: African American History, HABS/HAER/HALS, Photographs
Posted by: Jeff Bridgers
While Washington’s recent impactful snowfall prompted my fellow blogger Kristi to focus on outdoor fun and frolic in her post last week, my thoughts turned to indoor comforts of home and hearth. As the years go by, I am now content, even happy until the lights start to flicker, to watch the snow fall and blow and accumulate from inside through …
Posted in: Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
The final flakes of the massive snowstorm which buried parts of the Washington, D.C. metro area in upwards of two feet of snow fell this past Saturday night. From shoveling to plowing to collecting snow in trucks to move it elsewhere, we are all now digging out. Aside from the work that comes with a …
Posted in: Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Last week we celebrated eight years of sharing Library of Congress pictures on the photosharing site, Flickr, by posting there one spectacular bridge photo each day for eight days. Why bridges? Because, when we began sharing photos in Flickr back in 2008, the Library of Congress also joined with Flickr to launch The Commons, which …
Posted in: Flickr, Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
The smallest detail in a photograph can sometimes be the key to unlocking its story. Take a look at this stereograph of a classroom full of students in 1908. When I found it in our collections, my curiosity was piqued by the students using handheld stereoscopes to view stereographs. (The girl at center in white …
Posted in: Photographs, Visual literacy
Posted by: Jeff Bridgers
The names of some landmark women photographers, Lisette Model, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White, to name three, may not only ring familiar but also prompt clear visual associations of now iconic images shot by each. Other names such as Zaida Ben-Yusuf, Thérèse Bonney, and Hansel Mieth, may be less familiar. Yet, they all, and another …
Posted in: Photographs, Women's History