Top of page
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
When John Margolies gave a talk at the Library of Congress in 2011 about his project to photograph roadside attractions and commercial vistas all across America, he remarked, “If anybody knows if these places still exist, tell me later ’cause that’s very often the only way that I find out whether things are there anymore.” …
Posted in: Architecture, Flickr, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Nine years ago this month, the Library of Congress, after much planning and discussion, loaded photos for the first time to Flickr and began an extended, gratifying exchange with picture lovers all over the world. That first upload put the Library’s pictures in front of a community whose members enjoy looking closely, appreciating fully, and …
Posted in: Flickr, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Last week we celebrated eight years of sharing Library of Congress pictures on the photosharing site, Flickr, by posting there one spectacular bridge photo each day for eight days. Why bridges? Because, when we began sharing photos in Flickr back in 2008, the Library of Congress also joined with Flickr to launch The Commons, which …
Posted in: Flickr, Photographs
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 …
Posted in: Flickr, Photographs
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 …
Posted in: Flickr, News & Events, Photographs
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. …
Posted in: Flickr, Photographs
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 …
Posted in: Flickr, Photographs, Researcher Stories
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 …
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 …
Posted in: Flickr, News & Events, Photographs, Prints