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Archive: 2017 (17 Posts)

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

“Exclamation Points”—John Margolies Photographs of Roadside America Ready for Touring

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

The following is guest post by Micah Messenheimer, Assistant Curator of Photography, Prints and Photographs Division. Over the span of nearly forty years, John Margolies took more than eleven thousand color slide photographs of vernacular structures across America’s highways, byways, and main streets. Traversing the country, he was drawn to the architecture that came to …

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

What’s in all Those File Cabinets? Pictures for Browsing

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

 The following is a guest post by Melissa Lindberg, Reference Librarian, Prints & Photographs Division. Melissa joined the reference section in February 2017. In my first week as a reference librarian in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, I was told by several colleagues that it takes at least a decade …

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

Witness to History: Civil War Photographs

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

Last month’s offering in this series of posts about documentary and photojournalism collections noted how the Crimean War posed an opportunity—and enormous challenges—to British photographer Roger Fenton. Just six years later, a conflict on American soil, likewise, fueled Mathew Brady’s entrepreneurial ambitions, leading to some of the best known photographic documentation of the Civil War. …

Hallie Quinn Brown. Photo by F. S. Biddle, between 1875 and ca. 1888. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.50302

Portraits of Nineteenth Century African American Women Activists Newly Available Online

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

The following is a guest post by Beverly Brannan, Curator of Photography, Prints & Photographs Division. African American women as well as men assumed civic responsibilities in the decades after the Civil War. William Henry Richards (1856-1941) was active in several organizations that promoted civil rights and civil liberties for African Americans at the end …

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

Witness to History: Roger Fenton’s Photographs of the Crimean War

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

The Library’s documentary and photojournalism collections reflect just how regularly photographers in each generation have taken up the challenge of providing a visual record of noteworthy events and scenes of the everyday.  This is the first in a series of blog posts that consider major photojournalism and documentary photo collections in the Prints and Photographs …

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

Another Happy Anniversary Toast to the Flickr Commons!

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

Nine years ago this month, the Library of Congress, after much planning and discussion, loaded photos for the first time to Flickr and began an extended, gratifying exchange with picture lovers all over the world. That first upload put the Library’s pictures in front of a community whose members enjoy looking closely, appreciating fully, and …