Explore the faces, places and events of the U.S. Civil War in a single online location, using a new feature in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. The “Civil War” category aids research across thousands of images relating to the Civil War that are found in different Prints & Photographs Division collections in a variety […]
During the summer of 1936, Walker Evans, a preeminent photo documentarian of the New Deal, worked with writer James Agee on a project originally intended for Fortune magazine about the devastating effects of economic conditions on white tenant farmers. Agee and Evans spent eight weeks that summer researching their assignment, mainly among three white sharecropping […]
When working with historical photo collections, it always pays to ask yourself: Does the title match the content? The original photographers sometimes mixed up dates and places, or misspelled words and omitted key info — just like you or I might. Glancing at this pair of photographs, they seem to show the same scene. But […]
I had the good fortune to spend a little time last week in “Timely and Timeless,” an exhibition of comic art in the new Graphic Arts Galleries in the Thomas Jefferson Building. The works on exhibit are drawn from the abundance of cartoons and comics the Prints & Photographs Division has acquired over the last […]
Recently I had one of those days when Prints & Photographs Division collections intersected with my personal life. I came home to an exclamation from my daughter, who was trolling the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog for a school assignment: “Mom, the Office of War Information photographed my high school during World War II!” The […]
This peek “Behind the Scenes” is the first post in an occasional series where we invite you to see how the Prints & Photographs Division manages a collection in excess of 14 million images. The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. The Prints & Photographs Division has started […]
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. […]
The tools of her trade are simple: colored pencils, crayons, pens, and paper. Yet, armed with just these tools artist Marilyn Church has brought to life some of the most dramatic moments in high-profile courtroom trials during the past 36 years. Her work has covered such well-known people as Martha Stewart, J.K. Rowling, Bernard L. Madoff, Jacqueline Onassis, the men […]
Catch the man – and the woman – behind the camera in a set of photographs recently added to the Library of Congress Flickr photostream. Drawn from multiple collections and ranging from the mid-1800s to the modern day, the Photographer in the Picture set shows photographers at work, sometimes catching them only in shadow or […]
On September 26, 1859, sisters Lucretia Electa and Louisa Ellen Crossett stood before photographer Alfred Hall to have their portrait taken together in Lawrence, Massachusetts. I like to think of them as mill workers participating in the expanding American Industrial Revolution. The sisters, dressed in identical aprons, blouses, and simple jewelry, are both holding weaving […]