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Posted by: Kristi Finefield
“Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o’ the pudding-race!” (Robert Burns, Address To A Haggis) I hope you’ve already begun preparing your Burns Supper, because today is Robert Burns Day, and it takes several hours to make a proper haggis! If the prospect of dinner cooked in a sheep’s stomach does not appeal, …
Posted in: News & Events, Prints
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Four years ago today we embarked on an experiment to post photographs from Library of Congress collections on the photosharing site, Flickr. We had done considerable planning, and we were quite clear on our aims: to share images with a community of picture lovers who may not have known that libraries collect pictures, and to …
Posted in: Flickr, News & Events, Photographs, Posters
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Can you imagine the D.C. skyline without the familiar obelisk of the Washington Monument? If Peter Force’s 1837 design had been chosen, it could have been a hollowed-out pyramid. Or what if Memorial Bridge welcomed visitors to the city with looming turrets and towers instead of the low profile it presents today? These possibilities and …
Posted in: Architecture, Drawings, News & Events, Prints
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
As the previous “Words About Pictures” blog post demonstrated, street scenes can offer considerable matter for interpretation. Not only do they show exteriors, but they stir thoughts about interiors: what might be going on inside the buildings or the people depicted? Here’s an image that brings interior and exterior together in an interesting way and …
Posted in: News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Historic news photographs offer an immediacy and perspective on past events that make them among the most popularly requested items in our collections. The Prints & Photographs Division’s New York World-Telegram & the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection is a case in point. Consisting of an estimated one million photographs that the newspaper assembled between …
Posted in: News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
In a previous post (“Still Feeling the Glow: Photo Guessing Game at the National Book Festival,” Oct. 26), we described how we brought copies of photographs from Prints & Photographs Division collections to the National Book Festival in September and asked visitors to participate in a “guessing game.” We showed the pictures first with no …
Posted in: News & Events, Photographs, Visual literacy
Posted by: Jeff Bridgers
In Railroad Stations: The Buildings That Linked the Nation, David Naylor chronicles the history and stylistic character of one of our nation’s most iconic building types. Prolifically illustrated with images from the collections of the Prints & Photographs Division, the volume is organized by geographic region. In addition to showing the exteriors of many stations, …
Posted in: Architecture, Drawings, News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The author signing lines have long disappeared and the tents have come down, but we are still reveling in the pleasures of sharing photos and ideas about photos at the National Book Festival last month (Sept. 24-25). We had hundreds of people stop by our table in the Library of Congress Pavilion to try our …
Posted in: News & Events, Photographs, Visual literacy
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Explore the faces, places and events of the U.S. Civil War in a single online location, using a new feature in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. The “Civil War” category aids research across thousands of images relating to the Civil War that are found in different Prints & Photographs Division collections in a variety …
Posted in: Drawings, News & Events, Photographs