Eleven years ago today we posted our first sets of photos in the Flickr Commons, which was created to share treasures from the world’s public archives. Thousands of pictures, views, and comments later, we’re celebrating with a new album of pictures with an “eleven-ish” connection and an invitation to participate in a tagging activity in …
The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. It’s a remarkable achievement for any social media program to still be going strong after ten years. But the most important part of the Flickr Commons is the opportunity to talk about pictures without the barriers of time and place. A …
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.” …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …