The following is an interview with Barbara Orbach Natanson, former Head of the Prints & Photographs Reading Room. Melissa: Can you tell us about your background, and what roles you played at the Library of Congress before you retired this past December? Barbara: I first came to the Library of Congress in 1980 to do …
The following is a guest post by Mari Nakahara, Curator of Architecture, Design, and Engineering, and Katherine Blood, Curator of Fine Prints, Prints & Photographs Division. The year 2022 marks the 110th anniversary of the gift of 3,000 cherry trees from the city of Tokyo to Washington, D.C. in 1912, an enduring symbol of the …
The following is a guest post by Barbara Orbach Natanson, former Reference Section Head, Prints & Photographs Division. Being a woman of a certain age myself, I recently began to wonder how and where older women are depicted in Prints & Photographs Division collections. Naturally, even in embarking on such an exploration, one has to …
The following is a guest post by Ryan Brubacher, Reference Librarian, Prints & Photographs Division. Preparation for an upcoming virtual orientation (details below) led me to explore the HABS/HAER/HALS (HHH) Collection with an eye towards finding women in the role of architect or designer. The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), …
Images from the Prints & Photographs Division’s collections help to illustrate the sustained contributions of Black Americans to the United States through military service over the course of the nation’s history. We hope you can join us for one of two “Finding Pictures: African Americans in the Military” webinar sessions this month (details at the …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
![Untitled photo, possibly related to: Washington, D.C. Jewal Mazique [i.e. Jewel], worker at the Library of Congress, getting a late snack. Photo by John Collier, Jr., 1942. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8d20264](https://blogs.loc.gov/picturethis/files/2022/04/service-pnp-fsa-8d20000-8d20200-8d20264v.jpg)
![Parishoners [sic] of St. Thomas Church resting after spending many hours preparing food for a benefit picnic supper. Near Bardstown, Kentucky. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott, 1940. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8a43010](https://blogs.loc.gov/picturethis/files/2022/03/master-pnp-fsa-8a43000-8a43000-8a43010u.jpg)
