Top of page
Posted by: Jan Grenci
My latest Flickr album is titled Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow. Featured in it is a poster advertising the December 1895 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Designed by Joseph J. Gould, it shows a holly-festooned woman carrying the latest issue of the magazine as the snow swirls around her: In the …
Posted by: Melissa Lindberg
The following guest post is by Maggie McCready, Archivist in the Prints & Photographs Division. A collection of nearly 1,200 prints and posters by 265 different artists is now online at the Library of Congress. This artwork represents 40 years’ worth of culture, printmaking, and protest based in the San Francisco Bay area. Let me …
Posted in: Prints, Ready for Research
Posted by: Jan Grenci
Take a look at this colorful poster, designed by Robert E. Lee, a California-born painter and commercial artist who lived in New York City, and published in 1929. The company advertised on this poster, the Railway Express Agency (REA), was an American package delivery service. Operating between 1918 and 1975, they used railroads as one …
Posted in: FSA/OWI, Photographs, Posters, Prints
Posted by: Jan Grenci
When searching in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC), one fascinating image can often lead to another. That is what happened when I was looking for apple images for the latest Flickr album How Do You Like These Apples? I included this Currier & Ives lithograph from the Popular Graphic Arts Collection in the …
Posted in: Flickr, Photographs, Prints
Posted by: Jan Grenci
My latest Flickr album features photographs of signs from across the United States taken by Carol M. Highsmith from the late 20th century to the present day. In this blog post I’d like to focus on some older photos of signs taken for the Farm Security Administration in the late 1930s and early 1940s by …
Posted in: Flickr, FSA/OWI, Photographs, Prints
Posted by: Melissa Lindberg
In the following guest post, Prints & Photographs Division Senior Cataloging Specialist Kara Chittenden interviews National Public Radio reporter Joseph Shapiro. Joseph Shapiro is an investigative reporter for National Public Radio. When he was a teenager living in Washington, D.C., he was intrigued by the photographs in the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph …
Posted in: Prints
Posted by: Jan Grenci
A while back I assembled an album for Flickr of images of umbrellas. More recently, I selected color fashion photos taken by Toni Frissell for another album. While gathering the Frissell images, I noticed that umbrellas and parasols appeared with some regularity. In some shots umbrellas shield their holders from the rain while in others …
Posted in: Flickr, Photographs, Prints
Posted by: Melissa Lindberg
The following is a guest post by Technical Services Technician Michelle An, with contributions from Technical Services Technician Jenni Orme and Curator of Popular and Applied Graphic Art Sara Duke. All authors work in the Prints & Photographs Division. With 6,000 items, the Dietrich Hecht collection of Bilderbogen (picture sheets) provides a robust cross section …
Posted in: Prints
Posted by: Jan Grenci
One image from my latest Flickr album on fireworks really caught my eye. It is a 1929 postcard of the dedication of the Foshay Tower in Minneapolis, Minnesota: The three day dedication event in August and September of 1929 included fireworks. When I first saw this postcard, I knew nothing of the Foshay Tower. Now …
Posted in: Architecture, Flickr, FSA/OWI, Photographs, Prints