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Posted by: Melissa Lindberg
Frederick Douglass was a firm believer in the power of pictures. In an 1861 lecture called “Pictures and Progress” by the press, Douglass wondered why photography pioneer Louis Daguerre was not more frequently compared with inventors of such vaunted technologies as the telegraph or the steamboat: “the great father of our modern pictures is seldom …
Posted in: African American History, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The following is a guest post by Martha H. Kennedy, Curator of Popular & Applied Graphic Art, Prints & Photographs Division. It’s another in our blog series “Ready for Research,” which highlights collections moving out of the backlog. We’re celebrating the recent cataloging of more than 600 editorial cartoon drawings by Anne Briardy Mergen (1906-1994). …
Posted in: Cartoons, Ready for Research, Women's History
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Every research journey starts with a question! Just such a question sparked this entry of Double Take, the occasional series where we dig a little deeper into an image in our collections. This photo of a young African American boy in the Farm Security Administration (FSA) Collection sent me on a journey 79 years in …
Posted in: African American History, Photographs, Series: Double Take
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The following is a guest post by Mari Nakahara, Curator of Architecture, Design & Engineering, with Micah Messenheimer, Curator of Photography, Prints & Photographs Division, talking with researcher David R. Hanlon. I am always grateful when researchers discover treasures in unprocessed collections, the contents of which have often not been fully explored. Professor David R. …
Posted in: Photographs, Researcher Stories