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Category: Photographs

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 …

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

Advancing Archives, History and Heritage: Making the Less Visible More Discoverable

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

The following is an interview with Antonio Austin, who has been serving as an Archives, History and Heritage Advanced virtual intern in the Prints & Photographs Division since early February, with a goal of recommending ways to bring historical material to a larger audience in innovative ways. Antonio is working on a PhD in history …

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

Revisiting Rights-Free: Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

The Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) color photographs provide a vivid glimpse into life in the United States from 1939 to 1945 — a period more often viewed through a monochromatic lens. If you are familiar with the FSA/OWI photographs at the Library of Congress, chances are that the first images that come …

House Black Caucus Shirley Chisholm. Photo by Warren K. Leffler, 1973. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.55931

Shirley Chisholm in Pictures: Unbought and Unbossed

Posted by: Melissa Lindberg

Shirley Chisholm laid the groundwork for many who would follow her footsteps into national politics. As an activist who was often in the public eye, she is well represented in Prints & Photographs Division collections. Elected as a Representative for New York’s 12th congressional district in 1968, Chisholm was the first Black woman to serve …