A recent Picture This blog post aptly titled: Posing (and Solving) Mysteries: Harris & Ewing Photographs Invite Detective Work included a photo that did invite some additional detective work! This leads us to this latest entry in our occasional series, Double Take, where we take a much closer look at images in our collections.
My colleague, reference librarian Jon Eaker, believed this photo was a crowd watching the victory parade on Sept. 17, 1919, that welcomed Pershing and the 1st Division to Washington after World War I. The question for me: could I confirm exactly where these people were perching so precariously on stacks of bricks to get a peek?
As surprising as it may be if you have visited Washington, D.C. in modern times, there were multiple smokestacks in the National Mall region connected to power plants at that time, so figuring out which exact one I was seeing wasn’t the easiest starting point. The prominently identified Public Ledger building seemed like an easy road to identification, but my initial searches weren’t very fruitful. The Public Ledger was a well-known Philadelphia newspaper, but finding out if this was a Washington, D.C., distribution center or office for correspondents proved a challenge, so I looked more closely at the other buildings on the street. The one that is hardest to read looked to have the most information so I modified the image in an image editing tool to increase the contrast, and managed to make out: Ask Mr. Foster on the sign across the top of the building. Sometimes it takes looking at an image in a totally new way to get a new clue!
So, what about that large white building I noticed in the photo? A quick check of the map shows the John A. Wilson Building standing there today. I know it as the D.C. city hall, and it was known for most of the 20th century as the District Building. It is a visual match for the part of the building I can see in the original photo.
And it was in searches in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog that I hit upon what I think of as a jackpot image, confirming multiple details all at once:
This particular puzzle reminded me that the most obvious clues in a photo aren’t necessarily going to be the ones that lead to an answer. At first glance, the Public Ledger sign and the smokestack stood out to me, but they were ultimately not the key. It took a bit more creative thinking and of course, a bit of good fortune, thanks to the tens of thousands of views of Washington, D.C. digitized from our collections waiting to offer more clues along the way.
Learn More:
- Explore the National Photo Company Collection, full of tens of thousands of photos of Washington, D.C., many from about 1909 to 1932. Join any of the many parades featured in the collection.
- Explore the city of Washington, D.C. through maps issued by Foster & Reynolds which have been digitized by the Library of Congress Geography & Map Division. See if you can spot Ask Mr. Foster locations featured on the map!
- Revisit other puzzling pictures in the Double Take series of posts in Picture This.
Comments (3)
Very fun read. I shared the previous post with others who enjoyed it as well. Thanks for the update!
I so enjoy reading your thinking and searching processes! thanks for taking the time to write these Double Take posts
Thanks for another nifty piece of detective work. This story also reminded me of the background conversations that surrounded photo-collection digitization planning a few years ago, when such efforts got rolling. To what degree, we asked, is the desired outcome “aesthetically pleasing?” What _other_ factors ought to also be considered when planning the technical approach? (I write as a retired LC employee who participated in these discussions.) In our planning at LC, we saw that — especially for collections of negatives like Harris & Ewing — there were many excellent reasons to produce digital scans that were _not_ tweaked for maximum online beauty. In part we knew that, just like taking a negative to a darkroom, enduser preferences about image contrast and tone would vary: one “look” for a print publication, another for online viewing, yet another for a museum exhibition. If the digital master carried “all” the information forward from the source print or negative, careful endusers could tweak the downloaded master file to suit their requirements. Indeed, such masters were often not maximally beautiful.
In this blog you have highlighted _another_ reason for the capture-all-image-information approach: forensic analysis. The ability of someone using imaging software to reveal the words “Ask Mr. Foster” is supported by the richly endowed master image scan. That’s, um, a beautiful outcome indeed!