Tag: Kristi Finefield

“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…

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…

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…

The following is a guest post by Hanna Soltys, Reference Librarian, Prints & Photographs Division. The Work Projects Administration (WPA) Poster Collection is one of the Library’s treasures. We’ve hosted many orientations in person and online about these posters, and this time we’re offering an introduction to the collection during the evening hours! On Thursday, July 7, at 7:00pm EST, I will host a virtual webinar that discusses the collection history, topical themes represented in the posters, and how to download images. I will share some of my favorite poster designs, such as this reading-focused one by Arlington Gregg. A book mark would be better! Poster by Arlington Gregg, between 1936 and 1940. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.31264 In addition, the presentation will discuss…