Category: Picture this

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 “rendered” in color, because Prokudin-Gorskii captured each scene through blue, green, and red filters. But the available techniques for recovering the color were so costly that, after fifty years, special projects for books and exhibits had produced only a small number of color images available for viewing. The arrival of digitizing technology inspired the Library’s scan center director, Lynn Brooks, to try again and to…

In the following guest post, Prints & Photographs Division Senior Cataloging Specialist Kara Chittenden interviews National Public Radio reporter Joseph Shapiro. Joseph Shapiro reporting from the NPR studio. Photo by Wanyu Zhang/NPR. Used by permission. 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 Collection in the Prints & Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. He returned again and again to study them. The Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection (FSA/OWI) has been one of the most frequently consulted collections in the Prints & Photographs Division for decades. Begun as part of…

The following is a guest post by Paloma Ronis von Helms, Prints & Photographs Division Stanford in Government Liljenquist Fellow. Paloma Ronis von Helms at her work station in the Prints & Photographs Division. Photo by Paloma Ronis von Helms, 2022. 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 scenes of the Civil War. I became interested in why these images were taken—what meanings did they have for their owners? For example, images of soldiers were taken to comfort families who might never see their loved ones again. In other cases, individuals sought…