Top of page

Category: Photographs

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

The Waifs of the Deep: Titanic Survivors

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

Who are the two little French boys that were dropped, almost naked, from the deck of the sinking Titanic into the arms of survivors in a lifeboat?  From which place in France did they come and to which place in the new world were they bound? There is not one iota of information to be …

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

A Gardening Gold Mine

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. When house and garden historian Sam Watters first learned about Frances B. Johnston’s color garden photos from the early 1900s, he e-mailed us right away. An appointment was soon arranged to show him these fascinating but uncataloged “magic lantern slides.” We …

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

Baseball’s Spring Training

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

As I write this post on March 29th, Washington’s cherry trees have already bloomed . . . and gone . . . and another rite of spring has passed as well: baseball’s spring training! The 2012 Major League Baseball season commenced yesterday in Tokyo as the Seattle Mariners defeated the Oakland Athletics (who got their …

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

Words About Pictures: More National Book Festival Visitor Comments

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

We are still savoring the comments visitors to the National Book Festival offered last fall while viewing sample photographs from our collections.  This visitor’s comments seem particularly apt as we continue to celebrate Women’s History Month. The commenter recognized the well-known subject of the photograph, educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. Bethune served …

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

Alice Rohe: Pioneering Woman Photojournalist

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

Start with a solid upbringing as the daughter of an artist father in late 19th-century Kansas; add a college education at a time when women were generally not college-bound; combine a heaping helping of five years in turn-of-the-century New York City with a dash of women’s rights. Then, fold in recovery in a Colorado sanitorium …

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

Civil War Faces – New Additions

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. “You know the generals. Now meet the young men who made them famous.” That’s how Tom Liljenquist describes the special collection of rare portrait photographs that he continues to build at the Library of Congress to commemorate the American Civil War. …

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

A Window on the Bolshevik Revolution

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

When James Maxwell Pringle departed for Russia in November 1917, his intent was to visit the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) branch of his employer, National City Bank. His business trip turned into an unexpected window on the Bolshevik Revolution. Arriving in Petrograd in the days just after the October Revolution, when Bolshevik forces overthrew the Russian …