A few years ago, I tried out a summer “looking” challenge in an attempt to parallel the clever ideas my local public library uses to encourage summer book club participants to pick out volumes they might not have otherwise sampled (“Summer Looking Challenge–Touring the Collections with Azure Allure“). It’s getting to be that time of year again, so I decided to try sampling for the season itself. I started by doing a search in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog for the word, “summer.” I was soon off swinging from link to link on a chain of visual and word associations.
My initial “summer” search had me touring a variety of summer houses, visiting locations with “summer” in their place names and gazing at group portraits of child laborers who seemed anything but the picture of carefree summer (the captions identified the ages they had attained “last summer”).