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Category: Photographs

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

A Bicycle Challenge in the Nation’s Capital

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

This past year a researcher called to our attention a series of photographs of children posing with bicycles in the National Photo Company Collection. Below is one of the images, which came to the Library with a somewhat mysterious title: “Times girl on bicycle.” Documentation obtained by the researcher through the Library of Congress’s Chronicling …

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

Adding Context: Photographs of Japanese Americans Imprisoned During World War II

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

The following is a guest post by Mitsuko Brooks, an Archives, History and Heritage Advanced (AHHA) intern at the Library of Congress. Brooks is in her final semester as a student at Queens College (CUNY) working towards a Master of Library Science degree with a certificate in Archives and Preservation of Cultural Materials. This fall …

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

New Research Guide: Navigating for Images of Ships

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

The following is an interview with Jon Eaker, Reference Librarian, Prints & Photographs Division, about the subject of his research guide: Ships: Navigating for Images at the Library of Congress. Melissa: What is the most challenging thing about finding images related to ships in the collections? Jon: When searching the digitized collections in the Prints …

Untitled photo, possibly related to: Loading household goods into cars and trailer. Two families getting ready to move on in search of work picking fruit. Berrien County, Michigan. Photograph by John Vachon, 1940 July. //hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8c17741

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, but You’ve Got to Have One or Two to Start With

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

The following is a guest post by Taren Ouellette, Digital Library Specialist, Prints & Photographs Division. With 175,000 black-and-white film negatives, the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) Collection was a U.S. Government effort to capture scenes of American life during the 1930s and 1940s with such topics as the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, …

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

Finding Clues in Civil War Photographs

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

The following is a guest post by Nina Iskandarsjach, Prints & Photographs Division Stanford in Government Liljenquist Fellow. As an intern at the Prints & Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, I spent much of my summer researching images from the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs. Much of my work involved identifying …

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

Gadgets in Images: Obvious or Mysterious?

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

Barbara Natanson, Head of the Prints & Photographs Reading Room, recently searched the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog for “gadgets” and shared one of the images that appeared in the results – this photograph by Russell Lee likely taken at the Gonzales County Fair in Texas in 1939. Lee did not, or perhaps could not, …

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

Discoveries through Pictures: African Americans in the Civil War Era

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

The following is a guest post by Anastasia Sotiropoulos, the Prints & Photographs Division’s Stanford in Government Liljenquist Fellow. I came into my time as the Library’s Prints & Photographs Division Intern unsure of what cartes de visite were, let alone the big stories these tiny 3.5-by-2.5 inch photo cards hold. As I explored the …

San Francisco, Calif., Apr. 1942 - residents of Japanese ancestry registering for evacuation and housing, later, in War Relocation Authority centers for duration of the war. Photo of Shizuko Ina and others by Dorothea Lange, 1942.

“Her Name is Shizuko”—A Mother’s Influence

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

The following is a guest post by Karen “Kara” Chittenden, Senior Cataloging Specialist, Prints and Photographs Division. On April 25, 1942, a U.S. War Relocation Authority photographer documented a young Japanese American woman who was waiting in line for an appointment to receive a family registration number before being removed to the Tanforan Assembly Center …