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 …
The following is a guest post by Micah Messenheimer, Curator of Photography, Prints & Photographs Division. Who is the woman in this photograph? JD Sloan’s portrait offers an aura of mystery while commenting on both the glamour and the tedium of celebrity culture. Country singer Tammy Wynette stands on a dark Opryland stage facing away …
What do a carousel horse, Theodore Roosevelt, and a lighthouse have in common? Look closely at the drawing below from the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial – can you spot two Roosevelts? There is, of course, the large drawing of the Roosevelt statue featured at the memorial on Theodore Roosevelt …
Thousands of students, from kindergarten to graduate school, are sitting down at computers to attend class right now, using the internet to connect to teachers, resources, assignments and other students. The idea of this network of people learning from a distance brought to mind an interesting photo I came across some time ago while browsing …
The year 1870 is significant for copyright and the Library of Congress. Prior to that year, copyright registration was administered by the U.S. District Courts. Starting in 1870, the copyright registration and deposit system was centralized in the Library of Congress. One of the requirements for protecting your creation with copyright was to send in …
The studio of an artist–the place that allows an artist’s creativity to bloom–always raises so many questions. Is it chosen for some magical combination of the lighting, the location, the size of the artwork involved or types of tools needed? Is it messy, or tidy? Bare bones or full of luxurious decoration? Is it purely …
When I envision how to research a photograph or any other image, one methodology I come back to over and over consists of ever-widening circles, with the photo in question at center. Picture, if you will, a stone thrown in a still pond and the ripples flowing outwards, growing ever wider. Today’s stone is the …
In the Library’s latest Free to Use and Reuse set of images drawn from the collections, the focus is on the horse, and all the myriad ways these noble animals have been part of our lives, including sports, recreation, agriculture, transportation, and so on. I spotted one image that for me, and maybe for many …
Just across town from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., stands Gallaudet University, an institute for higher learning for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed the law that allowed the school to begin issuing college degrees, a milestone for deaf people seeking higher education. Edward M. Gallaudet (right) was the …