Top of page
Posted by: Jeff Bridgers
For Leap Day 2012, Prints & Photographs proudly presents an 1896 circus poster for Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers Enormous Shows Combined which promotes the Leap Year Ladies of Laughter. As “the only clown women who wear the comic crown,” these alliterative ladies are said to have a comedic touch as “variable as the shade …
Posted in: Posters
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
“Meet an American soldier of production. … His uniform is a pair of overalls and a welder’s mask. Not reveille, but a battered alarm clock awakens him six days a week at 6 a.m. There are no service stripes on those welder’s sleeves he wears but his part in the winning of this war is …
Posted in: Photographs, Posters
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Four years ago today we embarked on an experiment to post photographs from Library of Congress collections on the photosharing site, Flickr. We had done considerable planning, and we were quite clear on our aims: to share images with a community of picture lovers who may not have known that libraries collect pictures, and to …
Posted in: Flickr, News & Events, Photographs, Posters
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Keep Your Teeth Clean. Spare the Trees. Be Careful Near Machinery. Advice dispensed by posters created between 1936 and 1943 for the WPA continues to make good sense today. (WPA first stood for Works Progress Administration, and later Work Projects Administration.) If you are still shopping for New Year’s resolutions, maybe you can turn for …
Posted by: Jeff Bridgers
In honor of this most auspicious anniversary of Veterans Day, falling as it does on 11/11/11, our colleagues in the Serial and Government Publications Division have launched a new set of World War I rotogravures in War of the Nations, 1919 on the Library of Congress Flickr site. During the World War I era (1914-18), …
Posted in: Flickr, Photographs, Posters
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Can you take a photograph of a ghost? Will a spirit pose for your camera? Looking at “spirit photographs” from the mid-1800s to early-1900s, you might be tempted to answer, “Yes”! Claims of capturing a spirit with the camera lens were made as early as the 1850s, when photography was relatively new to the world. …
Posted in: Photographs, Posters
Posted by: Jeff Bridgers
Fans of the photos we share through the Library of Congress Flickr account have expressed interest recently in the Bain News Service’s coverage of the 1914 World Series which appear in our photostream. It certainly is timely as the World Series starts tonight pitting the St. Louis Cardinals against the Texas Rangers in a best-of-seven …
Posted in: Photographs, Posters
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
What’s the date of this photo? Take your best guess, and then I’ll mention some clues I pursued. The photo shows the busy catalog card distribution office at the Library of Congress. There’s no date on the photographic print. Recently, we needed to determine when the photo was taken, so out came my magnifying glass. …
Posted in: Photographs, Posters, Visual literacy