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Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Perhaps it’s the impending arrival of April 1, but my first thought upon looking at this photo, placed on our “Caught Our Eyes” sharing wall by reference librarian Jon Eaker, was that it was an April Fool’s joke. As is sometimes the case with photos in our Harris & Ewing collection, where captions range from …
Posted in: Photographs, Series: Caught Our Eyes, Visual literacy
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The following is a guest post by Ryan Brubacher, Reference Librarian, Prints & Photographs Division Lewis Hine, at a certain point in his career, began to refer to himself as an “interpretive photographer” and not a social photographer as he’d been previously termed. While we might imagine him an investigative photo-journalist by today’s standards, his …
Posted in: Photographs, Portraits, Visual literacy
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
I ran across this photo several months ago while looking for something else, and immediately laughed and put it in my “don’t try this at home” file. But what I definitely recommend you do try at home, or anywhere else you have an opportunity, is to talk about pictures with others. It almost always adds …
Posted in: Photographs, Series: Caught Our Eyes, Visual literacy
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Many pictures come into Prints and Photographs Division collections with little or no identification on them. It’s not entirely surprising, since a portion of our collections were generated or collected by individuals who readily knew the who, what, where and when that depictions can evoke and didn’t feel compelled to write it down. But even …
Posted in: Photographs, Portraits, Researcher Stories, Visual literacy
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The semester is well underway in many U.S. schools and, by now, one would expect their classrooms to have acquired what my family referred to as the “lived-in look.” One of my favorite photo detail explorations is to peer closely at classrooms—particularly what appears at students’ seats, on the chalkboards and adorning the walls—and to …
Posted in: Photographs, Visual literacy
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
When I look at my family photographs, the stories behind them usually come flooding back to me. I recall the occasion–and often people and events I associate with the occasion, even if they aren’t shown in the pictures. But lacking those personal associations, photographs–especially historical photographs–can seem like vast mysteries–or closed storybooks. Now a wonderful …
Posted in: News & Events, Photographs, Visual literacy
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
How can one ever come to understand a collection of 170,000 pictures? If you read my post a few weeks ago about finding unprinted Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) photographs, you probably quickly realized that the collection is complex, consisting of many interrelated parts. I hope you also got a sense of the …
Posted in: FSA/OWI, Photographs, Visual literacy
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
We mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we’d be playing a game called “What’s My Title?” at the National Book Festival (Sept. 22-23). I can testify that it was wildly successful–and great fun. Hundreds of people stopped by to look at the five popular photographs we mounted on a wall, and many accepted the …
Posted in: Flickr, News & Events, Photographs, Visual literacy
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The Prints & Photographs Division will be on hand at this weekend’s National Book Festival (Sept. 22-23). If you’re planning on attending, please look for us in the LC Pavilion. Our focus will be “reading photographs,” and we’re inviting visitors to participate in a photo captioning game called “What’s My Title?” We’ll be displaying a …
Posted in: News & Events, Photographs, Visual literacy