Each month, I gather images from the holdings of the Prints & Photographs Division for a Flickr album. The albums have a theme, the most recent one being Women Photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI). It features the work of Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins, Dorothea Lange, And Marion Post Wolcott. As I was looking through photos in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) taken by Dorothea Lange, I spotted a photo, which at thumbnail size on my laptop, showed a car’s hubcap. When I enlarged the image, I got very excited when I saw reflections both on the car’s fender and in the hubcap! Untitled photo, possibly related to: Close-up view of abandoned dry land…
Category: Picture this
A Different Wrinkle: Representation of Older Women in P&P Collections
The following is a guest post by Barbara Orbach Natanson, former Reference Section Head, Prints & Photographs Division. The life & age of woman. Stages of woman’s life from the cradle to the grave. Lithograph by Kelloggs & Comstock, between 1848 and 1850. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3g03651 Being a woman of a certain age myself, I recently began to wonder how and where older women are depicted in Prints & Photographs Division collections. Naturally, even in embarking on such an exploration, one has to acknowledge certain caveats: “Older” is a relative term in any culture and, unless original captions indicate how a person’s age was regarded, it’s hard to know whether an individual was considered older in their own time. Moreover, minus captions…
Women Architects and Designers in the HABS/HAER/HALS Collections
Preparation for an upcoming virtual orientation (details below) led me to explore the HABS/HAER/HALS (HHH) Collection with an eye towards finding women in the role of architect or designer. The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), and Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS), form a repository of information on historic American structures and landscapes that are documented through photographs, drawings and written reports. Many women creators’ work is included in HHH and I have highlighted various ways you can find those contributions to this collection below, with the hope that it will inspire you to take the time to find them. Women designers (by name) Some famous women designers’ work can be found with simple searches of…
A Peek at Family Trees, Records & Registers
Like many people, I enjoy researching my family history, exploring my genealogy and collecting interesting facts, images, and records. As you can imagine, I sometimes come across visual materials in my work that make me think about my hobby. In our collections, we have many examples of commercially printed and sold family trees, records and registers. They were printed with empty spaces so your family members’ names, dates and other details could be added in. This wonderful family tree from 1888 was one of the first that caught my attention while searching in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. The tree itself – or the apples, more specifically – contain positive characteristics such as Politeness, Honor, Charity and Patience. In…