Photographer Angelo Antonio Rizzuto – or Anthony Angel, as he called himself – captured a variety of people, structures, and places in Manhattan over the eighteen-year period from 1949 through 1967. Collectively, the thousands of images by Angel in the Prints & Photographs Division offer a window into life and the built environment in a place that has no shortage of subjects to draw one’s eye. Capitalizing on Angel’s coverage of nearly the entire length of Manhattan, Prints & Photographs Division Technical Services Technician Michelle An used Story Maps, a program that enables the creator to merge a narrative with mapping technology, to create a dynamic resource that encourages researchers to explore the collection in new ways: “Midcentury Manhattan: Mapping…
Category: Picture this
Lend U.S. Your Eyes
“Will you supply eyes for the Navy?” The arresting image of a blindfolded officer at sea, lost and confused, paired with that question, make this an effective poster – the image caught my attention and made me look and read further. Will you supply eyes for the Navy? Navy ships need binoculars and spy-glasses. Poster by Gordon Grant, 1917. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3g10226 This World War I poster is calling for help from the general population in the United States, asking for a loan (though no promises of a return) of binoculars and spy-glasses to be used by the U.S. Navy in the war effort. I was curious about the program and searched further in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog for either…
The Art of the Book
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 back to the 1840s, contain actual photographic prints mounted to the pages. Hand-crafted and rare, they explore a wide variety of subjects, In the 1886 volume Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, photos such as this one, Quanting the Marsh Hay, Norfolk, England, show residents at work, moving hay down the waterway. A quant is the long pole used to propel the boats. Quanting…
Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign
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 John Vachon. Vachon is not as well-known as Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, or Walker Evans, but his output for the FSA is larger than the combined work of those three photographers. In 1940, in Woodbine, Iowa, Vachon photographed a deteriorating billboard. His two close-up images show the poster peeling away to show the billboard below: Billboard, Woodbine, Iowa. Photo by John Vachon, May 1940. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8a05710…