The following is a guest post by Ryan Brubacher, Reference Librarian, Prints & Photographs Division. Ryan joined the reference section in March 2017 As a new arrival to the Library, Washington D.C. and the East Coast in general, there is a lot to take in from all corners as I settle. An overwhelming amount of …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
The following is a guest post by Jonathan Eaker, Reference Librarian, Prints & Photographs Division. When the second rotation of the exhibit, “World War I: American Artists View the Great War,” opened with a new set of objects from Prints & Photographs Division collections, one striking poster jumped out at me. It shows a pair …
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 …