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Archive: 2021 (15 Posts)

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

A Bicycle Challenge in the Nation’s Capital

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

This past year a researcher called to our attention a series of photographs of children posing with bicycles in the National Photo Company Collection. Below is one of the images, which came to the Library with a somewhat mysterious title: “Times girl on bicycle.” Documentation obtained by the researcher through the Library of Congress’s Chronicling …

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

Adding Context: Photographs of Japanese Americans Imprisoned During World War II

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

The following is a guest post by Mitsuko Brooks, an Archives, History and Heritage Advanced (AHHA) intern at the Library of Congress. Brooks is in her final semester as a student at Queens College (CUNY) working towards a Master of Library Science degree with a certificate in Archives and Preservation of Cultural Materials. This fall …

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

New Research Guide: Navigating for Images of Ships

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

The following is an interview with Jon Eaker, Reference Librarian, Prints & Photographs Division, about the subject of his research guide: Ships: Navigating for Images at the Library of Congress. Melissa: What is the most challenging thing about finding images related to ships in the collections? Jon: When searching the digitized collections in the Prints …

Untitled photo, possibly related to: Loading household goods into cars and trailer. Two families getting ready to move on in search of work picking fruit. Berrien County, Michigan. Photograph by John Vachon, 1940 July. //hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8c17741

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, but You’ve Got to Have One or Two to Start With

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

The following is a guest post by Taren Ouellette, Digital Library Specialist, Prints & Photographs Division. With 175,000 black-and-white film negatives, the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) Collection was a U.S. Government effort to capture scenes of American life during the 1930s and 1940s with such topics as the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, …

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

Sultana’s Dream: Linocut Series by Chitra Ganesh

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

The following is a guest post by Charlotte Giles, Reference Librarian, Asian Division. In a new acquisition by the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Chitra Ganesh, a visual artist based in Brooklyn, retells the 1905 Indian feminist utopian essay, “Sultana’s Dream” by Begum Rokeya Sakhawat, but in the style of a graphic novel …

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

Finding Clues in Civil War Photographs

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

The following is a guest post by Nina Iskandarsjach, Prints & Photographs Division Stanford in Government Liljenquist Fellow. As an intern at the Prints & Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, I spent much of my summer researching images from the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs. Much of my work involved identifying …

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

Gadgets in Images: Obvious or Mysterious?

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

Barbara Natanson, Head of the Prints & Photographs Reading Room, recently searched the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog for “gadgets” and shared one of the images that appeared in the results – this photograph by Russell Lee likely taken at the Gonzales County Fair in Texas in 1939. Lee did not, or perhaps could not, …

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

Discoveries through Pictures: African Americans in the Civil War Era

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

The following is a guest post by Anastasia Sotiropoulos, the Prints & Photographs Division’s Stanford in Government Liljenquist Fellow. I came into my time as the Library’s Prints & Photographs Division Intern unsure of what cartes de visite were, let alone the big stories these tiny 3.5-by-2.5 inch photo cards hold. As I explored the …