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Category: Photographs

Frances Benjamin Johnston, full-length self-portrait dressed as a man. Photo (albumen silver print) by Frances Benjamin Johnston, between 1890 and 1900. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsc.04884

Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Hampton Album: A Researcher’s Exploration

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

The following is a guest post by Micah Messenheimer, Curator of Photography, Prints & Photographs Division. Conversations with visiting researchers that lead to new appreciation for the many interconnections among Library of Congress collections are one of the pleasures of my job as a photography curator. The following interview was done with Jane Pierce, Carl …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Caught Our Eyes: Celebrating Cars–and Car Parts!

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

The grounds of the U.S. Capitol have played host to millions of visitors, not to mention every flavor of celebrations and demonstrations. But it’s not often that you see a car parts strewn across the Capitol’s well-groomed grounds. Reference librarian Jon Eaker spotted this photo among photographs recently digitized from the U.S. News & World …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Charles and Ray Eames Slides: New Finding Aid Available

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

The following is a guest post by Ryan Brubacher, Reference Librarian, and Emma Esperon, Archivist, Prints & Photographs Division. We’re proud to welcome the Slides from the Eames Collection inventory to an online and searchable platform to help researchers discover descriptions of materials they didn’t even know they were looking for! The slides by noted …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Caught Our Eyes: Playing with Shadows

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

Reference Librarian Ryan Brubacher added this photo by Toni Frissell to our “Caught Our Eyes” wall for sharing pictures from the collections with our colleagues, noting that it had caught her eyes again. She recalls encountering it first because it was one of the hundreds of photos featured in the landmark “Family of Man” exhibition …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Summer Search: A Plum Assignment

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

A few years ago, I tried out a summer “looking” challenge in an attempt to parallel the clever ideas my local public library uses to encourage summer book club participants to pick out volumes they might not have otherwise sampled (“Summer Looking Challenge–Touring the Collections with Azure Allure“). It’s getting to be that time of …

Helen L. Gilson, Civil War nurse and head of the Colored Hospital Service. Photo by J.C. Moulton, between 1861 and 1865.

A Visual Salute to Nurses

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

The following is a guest post by Karen Chittenden, Cataloging Specialist in the Prints & Photographs Division. National Nurses Week recognizes the contributions of professional nurses, and this year we’d like to do the same by highlighting recently acquired photographs of wartime nurses who marshaled resources, medical skill, and courage to offer help in dire …