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 1930s, many of them in the American Southwest. We hope Gilpin’s striking picture of San Francisco de Asís Mission Church in Taos, New Mexico will inspire you to watch and learn. For those unable to attend the live session, the recording will be made available on the Library of Congress website. Rancho de Taos Mission, New Mexico. Photo by Laura Gilpin, 1930. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ds.14061 Learn More:…
Category: Picture this
Ready for Research: Dietrich Hecht collection of Bilderbogen
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 of the wide range of topics and uses for this rare type of ephemera. Examples include fables, military history, city views, and advertisements as well as confectionary decorations, paper doll and theater cutouts, board games, tavern decorations, and shooting targets, issued by German, French, and Russian publishers. The collection also has the Münchener Bilderbogen series–all 51 annual volumes that offer more than 1,200 picture stories.…
Double Take: Familiar Faces
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 Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) Collection, taken in April 1940. Research in visual materials can include simply looking through potentially related images, recognizing that captions and title information may not always describe everything shown. As we have explained in previous Picture This posts, the FSA/OWI collection includes untitled images, which came to us without a caption. A feature in the Prints & Photographs Online…
Revisiting Rights-Free: Panoramic Photographs
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 the Prints & Photographs Division’s collections are wide ranging, from majestic views of American landscapes and cities to wars and natural disasters, from scenes of fairs and expositions to portraits of groups as diverse as unions, military units, and Sunday School classes. Panorama of Little Yosemite from Liberty Cap. Photo by Pillsbury Photo Company, 1906. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pan.6a02183 NWTUL (National Women’s Trade Union) Convention, N.Y.C., 1924. Photo…