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Archive: 2019 (20 Posts)

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

What’s So Brutal about Brutalism?

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

The following is a guest post by Vyta Baselice, Architecture, Design & Engineering Programs Assistant, Prints & Photographs Division. Brutalism is an architectural style that emerged first in Great Britain in the 1950s and soon gained popularity in the United States. It is easily identifiable by the buildings’ large scale, rectangular shapes, and extensive use …

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

Caught Our Eyes: Playing with Shadows

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

Reference Librarian Ryan Brubacher added this photo by Toni Frissell to our “Caught Our Eyes” wall for sharing pictures from the collections with our colleagues, noting that it had caught her eyes again. She recalls encountering it first because it was one of the hundreds of photos featured in the landmark “Family of Man” exhibition …

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

Summer Search: A Plum Assignment

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

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 …

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

Art in Action: A Further Look at Socially-Engaged Contemporary Artist Prints

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

The following is a guest post by exhibition co-curator Katherine Blood, Curator of Fine Prints, Prints & Photographs Division. Writer James Baldwin observed that “An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian.” The Library of Congress exhibition Art in Action: Herblock and Fellow Artists Respond to Their Times explores the role of artists …

Helen L. Gilson, Civil War nurse and head of the Colored Hospital Service. Photo by J.C. Moulton, between 1861 and 1865.

A Visual Salute to Nurses

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

The following is a guest post by Karen Chittenden, Cataloging Specialist in the Prints & Photographs Division. National Nurses Week recognizes the contributions of professional nurses, and this year we’d like to do the same by highlighting recently acquired photographs of wartime nurses who marshaled resources, medical skill, and courage to offer help in dire …

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

Caught Our Eyes: A Thought-Provoking Farm Security Administration Negative

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

Digital Conversion Technician Brittany Long added this image to our “Caught Our Eyes” sharing wall a few months ago, with a two-word comment: “Representation Matters.” Brittany encountered the image while working on a team that is going negative by negative through a segment of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) Collection to make …

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

Focusing on Lewis Hine’s Photographic Technique

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

The following is a guest post by Ryan Brubacher, Reference Librarian, Prints & Photographs Division Lewis Hine, at a certain point in his career, began to refer to himself as an “interpretive photographer” and not a social photographer as he’d been previously termed. While we might imagine him an investigative photo-journalist by today’s standards, his …