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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: Jeff Bridgers
One hundred years ago, on December 14, 1911, Roald Amundsen and four members of his Norwegian expedition team arrived at the South Pole. Originally, Amundsen intended to be the first to reach the North Pole, but upon learning that Robert Peary and Frederick Cook had already achieved the feat, he made a historic change of …
Posted in: Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Thanks to a recent initiative by Library of Congress and National Park Service staff, the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog has grown by nearly 400,000 records. Through a bit of technical wizardry, there is now a record for each digital image in one of our cornerstone collections: the Historic American Buildings Survey/ Historic American Engineering …
Posted in: Architecture, Drawings, HABS/HAER/HALS, 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 honor of this most auspicious anniversary of Veterans Day, falling as it does on 11/11/11, our colleagues in the Serial and Government Publications Division have launched a new set of World War I rotogravures in War of the Nations, 1919 on the Library of Congress Flickr site. During the World War I era (1914-18), …
Posted in: Flickr, Photographs, Posters
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: Kristi Finefield
Can you take a photograph of a ghost? Will a spirit pose for your camera? Looking at “spirit photographs” from the mid-1800s to early-1900s, you might be tempted to answer, “Yes”! Claims of capturing a spirit with the camera lens were made as early as the 1850s, when photography was relatively new to the world. …
Posted in: Photographs, Posters
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