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Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints and Photographs Division. I could look at photographs all day long. Contemporary or historical, black-and-white or color, provocative or soothing, portrait or landscape. All kinds of images can draw my interest, and some photos have the power to stop me in my tracks. These …
Posted in: Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Juneteenth celebrates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. One way to commemorate this anniversary might be to explore the online collection Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938. More than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of formerly enslaved people are available online. These narratives were collected in …
Posted in: African American History, Photographs, Portraits
Posted by: Melissa Lindberg
Below is an interview with Elizabeth Lindqwister, the summer 2019 Liljenquist Family Fellow, and Prints & Photographs Division staff members, Karen Chittenden and Micah Messenheimer, about creating a Story Map focusing on the Civil War experience of Susie King Taylor. Many courageous people are pulling double and triple duty in this time of quarantine for …
Posted in: African American History, Drawings, Photographs, Women's History
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
This guest post by Katherine Blood, Curator of Fine Prints, Prints & Photographs Division, highlights posters that complement the New York Poster House exhibition “The Letterpress Posters of Amos Kennedy” (October 8, 2020–January 3, 2021), curated by Angelina Lippert. Detroit-based letterpress artist Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. wields wood type and ink in ways that can …
Posted in: African American History, Posters, Prints
Posted by: Melissa Lindberg
As I was perusing the online catalog this week with Hispanic Heritage Month in mind, a number of photographs of murals stood out to me. The mural tradition has long been strong in Hispanic communities in the United States, perhaps most notably as a part of the Chicano art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. …
Posted in: Hispanic American History, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The following is a guest post by Victoria Bankole, an Archives, History, and Heritage Advanced Intern in the Prints & Photographs Division in spring 2020. “Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.” — Octavia E. Butler Just as author Octavia Butler created herself through writing, photographers such as Roland Freeman use their …
Posted in: African American History, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The following is a guest post by Katherine Blood, Curator of Fine Prints, Prints & Photographs Division. Riveting drawings by artist Toni Lane are among the first COVID-19 acquisitions by the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (P&P). Seniors First is part of a series of drawings that Lane began in mid-March and is …
Posted in: Acquisitions, Prints