Join curators Adam Silvia and Sara Duke as they highlight photographically illustrated books as well as graphic illustrations for books in the Prints & Photographs Division collections in two upcoming virtual presentations. Read on for a preview of some of the images and volumes they will share. Photographically illustrated books, some dating all the way […]
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 […]
The following interview with photographer Walt Frankhauser is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief of the Prints & Photographs Division. Back in 1948, the Library of Congress acquired close to 2,000 rare glass-plate negatives created by the Russian photographer Sergei M. Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944). We knew that what appeared to be black-and-white images could be […]
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 […]
The following is a guest post by Paloma Ronis von Helms, Prints & Photographs Division Stanford in Government Liljenquist Fellow. As this year’s Summer Liljenquist Fellow in the Prints & Photographs Division at the Library of Congress, I reviewed ambrotype and tintype images, carte de visite photographs, lithographs, and other formats depicting soldiers and battlefield […]
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 […]
Join Curator of Photography Micah Messenheimer this Thursday, August 4, for a presentation on the landscape work of acclaimed 20th century photographer Laura Gilpin in the collections of the Prints & Photographs Division. The talk will highlight Gilpin’s craft, stylistic changes, and the range of sites, subjects, and people she photographed in the 1920s and […]
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 […]
Many entries in the Double Take series, where we look a little closer at images, come out of the steps I take to answer reference questions in my daily work. Recently, in response to a question seeking a photo of a particular building, I was browsing about 300 photographs of Dubuque, Iowa, from the Farm […]
Panoramic photographs from the Prints & Photographs Division collections can show us a lot about the interests and activities of Americans at the turn of the twentieth century and the decades that followed, while offering a more expansive view of a scene than a more standard size photograph could provide. Subjects of panoramic photographs in […]