What do eggs and the sun have in common? They are both vital materials in photographic processes. Both are represented in graphic form in photography related items from the Library’s vast collection of U.S. Patent Office trademark registrations. The collection covers the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the exact moment the photographic industry exploded, becoming accessible to both professionals and amateurs alike. This week’s post will share a sampling of these.
For many of us who live in or near cities, public transit is an integral part of our daily lives, helping us to travel to and from our job sites, schools, and countless other destinations. Join us as we explore subway-related images from the collections.
Holiday cooking season is upon us. Today we’re looking at technologies intending to make our lives in the kitchen a bit easier. Drawing from advertisements, trademark registrations, photographs, and architectural drawings, this post highlights time, energy, and space-saving devices designed (in theory) to streamline our culinary experiences.
Popular graphic art prints often reflect the tastes of their times, and fashion trends are one particularly fascinating area to survey. As we find ourselves ensconced in the fall season and quickly approaching winter, we were inspired to look for cold weather fashions in print. Join us as we look at details from one print.
Today’s post uses Margaret Wise Brown’s classic bedtime story Goodnight Moon as a playful framework for exploring the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. It incorporates a variety of items from across the collection, including stereographs, lithographs, trademark registrations, and photographs.
Every other month, staff in the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division come together for a “Learning Hour,” a time dedicated to knowledge sharing, training, and discussion. This month’s session took the form of a challenge: each participant opened an unfamiliar box from the collections and reported back on what they discovered. How is the collection arranged and described? What might a researcher encounter when using it? How could access be improved? This week’s post highlights some of the insights that emerged from that exercise.
A piece of Hardanger embroidery in a recent Flickr album on needlework inspires a deeper dive into the collections for more images of this regional style of embroidery, specific to the Hardanger area of western Norway.
Fans of art nouveau design may be surprised to learn that the Prints & Photographs Division has more than a dozen striking images by the man widely credited as the originator of the style -- Czech artist Alphonse Mucha -- in the collections. See some examples in this blog post.
Continuing in the same vein as last week’s post, today we are looking at the people, technologies, and skills involved with making ice cream. The post will incorporate both photographs and printed matter from the collection and will focus on home production of ice cream.
