The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division, with excerpts from the Richard Morris Hunt Research Guide. How do you breathe life into a valuable but under-appreciated and complicated collection from the 1800s? The Prints & Photographs Division was fortunate to earn the attention of Sam Watters—an exceptional historian of …
Let Prints & Photographs Division Reference Librarian Gillian Mahoney take you for a four-wheeled tour of car-related images from the collections this Wednesday, November 20 at 3:00pm EST. Explaining her interest in P&P’s extensive pictorial representation of cars, Gillian notes that, “images of cars in our catalog offer a fascinating glimpse into automotive and industrial …
Included in my most recent Flickr album on aerial views was the postcard below. This particular card is a photomechanical color print of Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, Louisiana. This was the site of the annual Sugar Bowl college football game for its first few decades, until it moved to the Superdome. Finding it sent …
The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. The Paul M. Rudolph Archive has become our most heavily used collection for the work of a single architect. Enthusiasts of modernism, building preservationists, and students and scholars from all over the world are among the many researchers who study this …
Whether you think black cats are spooky, good luck, or simply adorable companions, the many images featuring these striking felines in the collections are evidence that photographers and other artists have found them compelling since at least the 19th century. This photograph by Arthur Rothstein highlights the tonal contrast between the cat’s dark fur and …
The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, and Sara W. Duke, Curator of Popular and Applied Graphic Arts, Prints & Photographs Division. Politically independent and a champion of the little guy, Herbert L. Block (1909–2001)—better known as “Herblock”—spared no one from the wrath of his art. His pointed commentaries offer an opportunity …
I love making connections within our collections here in the Prints & Photographs (P&P) Division. Recently, I made an unexpected connection between our poster holdings and an artifact located across the Atlantic in London. During a visit to the London Transport Museum’s Global Poster Gallery, retired Reference Specialist for Posters, Jan Grenci, and I spotted …
The vast majority of the items in the Prints & Photographs Division’s collections are works of art on paper, such as photographs, posters, and architectural drawings. However, there are exceptions. In my latest Flickr album heralding the coming of autumn, there are two items featured that are not on paper at all, but are instead …
The following is a guest post by Ryan Brubacher, Reference Specialist, Prints & Photographs Division. I recently returned from an information-soaked conference in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where I toured and learned about structures related to the fascinating history of the copper mining industry in the Keweenaw area. When I came home, the experience …
