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Category: Flickr

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

“What’s this Gadget?”: Solving Mystery Photos

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

We asked “What’s this Gadget?” about a set of twenty-five uncaptioned photographs from the Harris & Ewing Collection, and you definitely put on your thinking caps – or maybe your psychographs – which we learned the smiling woman below is “wearing”! This previously uncaptioned photograph shows a psychograph, a phrenology machine meant to measure the …

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

Providing Context with Chronicling America

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

My initial impression of the jovial sailors pictured below was that a letter “d” must have been left out of the annotated title in the photograph’s upper left corner. This World War I era photo from the Bain News Service is one of more than 15,000 photographs (a hefty subset of the 40,000 available from …

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

“What’s this Gadget?”: More Mystery Photos

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

If you enjoy a good mystery, get ready to start sleuthing! This Friday, we will be adding a new group of mystery photos to the Library of Congress Flickr account. A portion of the glass negatives in the Harris & Ewing Collection came to us with no captions, providing many challenging photo mysteries to solve. …

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

Sail Through a New Flickr Album: America’s Cup

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

Although I grew up within walking distance of the ocean, yacht races such as the historic America’s Cup–the match races between sailing yachts that have been held since 1851–have been largely off my radar. So I relished the opportunity to sail through nearly twenty years of America’s Cup history through a new Flickr album, “America’s …

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

Keep Mum: WPA Posters Do the Talking

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

Artists working for the Federal Art Project (FAP), a part of the Work Projects Administration (WPA), created thousands of posters between 1936 and 1943. The posters took on all manner of topics: public health and safety, cultural events and exhibitions, education, tourism, and wartime warnings, to name a few. Only a small percentage of those …

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

Seasonal Offerings: A New Japanese Prints Flickr Album and Special Sakura Display

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

The following is a guest post by Katherine Blood, Curator of Fine Prints, and Mari Nakahara, Curator of Architecture, Design, and Engineering, Prints & Photographs Division: As Washington’s beloved cherry trees are in full bloom, we are inspired to share an assortment of seasonal-themed images from the Library’s extensive holdings of Japanese woodblock prints. In Japanese …

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

“What’s the Story?”: Solving Mystery Photos

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

We asked “What’s the Story?” – and the answers came rolling in! Two months ago, we added twenty photographic puzzlers from the Harris & Ewing collection to the Library’s Flickr account with the (we hoped) tantalizing headline of “Mystery Photos – What’s the Story?” The corresponding glass negatives for these photos came to us without …