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Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Ringing in the New Year with a glass of champagne? Just as many holidays are associated with certain festive foods, New Year’s Eve has long seen many folks around the world enjoying a taste of that fizzy drink. This 1904 photo suggests one way to top off a bottle of bubbly, but I think I’ll …
Posted in: Cartoons, Photographs, Posters, Series: Feast Your Eyes
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Who can appreciate clear skies more than Santa? This 1927 Harris & Ewing photograph documents Santa receiving rather than giving: he gets the “all clear” to navigate the skies on Christmas Eve, complete with a pilot’s license. While a pilot’s license may not be on everyone’s wish list, anyone who has worked with historical photographs …
Posted in: Photographs, Series: Caught Our Eyes
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Pictures help tell stories. Two new books published by the Library of Congress are full of hundreds of prints, posters, photographs and other illustrations drawn from the Library’s vast collections. Both books look back over hundreds of years of American history and tell their respective stories with passion – and pictures. Football Nation: Four Hundred …
Posted in: Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. Which photographs do you consider “great”? I’d especially like to hear which images stand out in your mind’s eye, because I was recently challenged to define greatness for a new compilation of more than 700 fascinating pictures that represent the breadth …
Posted in: News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
It’s easy to relate to the first three words in the original caption for this photograph from the Harris & Ewing Collection: Initiative needed here. Whether it’s capturing a larger-than-life subject like the Capitol police officer below, or tackling the scanning and cataloging of thousands of fragile glass negatives, we can all agree that initiative …
Posted in: Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
You may recall that last President’s Day, members of the public enjoyed a rare treat—and recorded it with their cameras. Twice each year, the Library of Congress offers a public open house in the Main Reading Room of the Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C. The space is not normally open to photographers, but cameras …
Posted in: Architecture, Flickr, News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Photographs of veterans number in the thousands within the collections of the Library of Congress. We can see the faces of veterans of wars fought in foreign lands and in our own backyards. We have photographs of veterans who fought in wars in the last century – and the one before that – as well …
Posted in: Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
If every collection in the Prints and Photographs Division is an apple tree, full of tantalizing visual treats, then all of our holdings combined make for a vast orchard, ripe with possibility. My extended food metaphor is no accident, as we are launching a new monthly series here at Picture This entitled Feast Your Eyes. …
Posted in: Cartoons, Photographs, Posters, Prints, Series: Feast Your Eyes
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
As we near Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday on Oct. 27th, we have ongoing cause for celebration. A project to broaden access to images relating to Roosevelt’s life and times is putting new digital images and descriptions online each week. Last year, the project brought us illustrations from Puck magazine, including this visual jab at Roosevelt’s positive …
Posted in: Cartoons, Photographs, Prints