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Category: Photographs

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

Anything to Get the Shot: Photographers and War

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

In the latest installment of our occasional series on challenging photography, Anything to Get the Shot, I’m going to highlight one of the more dangerous choices a photographer can make: covering war. Photographers during the U.S. Civil War faced serious challenges in their work. Due to the size of the camera equipment and long exposure …

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

Signs of Their Times: “Jim Crow” Was Here

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other in any game of cards or dice, dominoes or checkers. –Birmingham, Alabama, 1930. “Jim Crow” laws systematically codified separation by race in the American South. Although it had begun some years before and persisted for some …

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

Sitting by the Fireside

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

While Washington’s recent impactful snowfall prompted my fellow blogger Kristi to focus on outdoor fun and frolic in her post last week, my thoughts turned to indoor comforts of home and hearth. As the years go by, I am now content, even happy until the lights start to flicker, to watch the snow fall and blow and accumulate from inside through …

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

Snow Fun: Sledding, Snowball Fights and More

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

The final flakes of the massive snowstorm which buried parts of the Washington, D.C. metro area in upwards of two feet of snow fell this past Saturday night. From shoveling to plowing to collecting snow in trucks to move it elsewhere, we are all now digging out. Aside from the work that comes with a …

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

Building Bridges through the Flickr Commons

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

Last week we celebrated eight years of sharing Library of Congress pictures on the photosharing site, Flickr, by posting there one spectacular bridge photo each day for eight days. Why bridges? Because, when we began sharing photos in Flickr back in 2008, the Library of Congress also joined with Flickr to launch The Commons, which …

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

Geography Through the Stereoscope

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

The smallest detail in a photograph can sometimes be the key to unlocking its story. Take a look at this stereograph of a classroom full of students in 1908. When I found it in our collections, my curiosity was piqued by the students using handheld stereoscopes to view stereographs. (The girl at center in white …

Women Photojournalists

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

The names of some landmark women photographers, Lisette Model, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White, to name three, may not only ring familiar but also prompt clear visual associations of now iconic images shot by each. Other names such as Zaida Ben-Yusuf, Thérèse Bonney, and Hansel Mieth, may be less familiar. Yet, they all, and another …

Effect of the marathon craze. Drawing by Charles Dana Gibson, 1909? http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cai.2a12854

In It for the Long Run

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

The following is a guest post by Lara Szypszak, Reference Technician in the Prints & Photographs Division. One of my favorite feelings is the wave of excitement and anxiety that washes over me as I join the crowds at the starting line of a race. There is something so special about joining a group of willing …