Photographs of the Library of Congress as well as images from its collections are featured in five new Library publications. These, and other Library of Congress publications, are available through the Library of Congress Sales Shop, Washington, D.C., 20540-4985. Credit-card orders are taken at (888) 682-3557, or shop on the Internet at www.loc.gov/shop/.
On These Walls: Inscriptions and Quotations of the Library of Congress
“On These Walls: Inscriptions and Quotations of the Library of Congress,” by Center for the Book Director John Y. Cole, has just been republished in a revised edition with more than 100 full-color illustrations by noted photographer Carol M. Highsmith.
Highsmith, who has documented American life and architecture for more than 30 years (see Information Bulletin, December 2007), began donating her archives to the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division in 1992. Her images can be found online.
This new publication features all-new photography by Highsmith to accompany Cole’s text, which is the most comprehensive guide available on the significance of the inscriptions and quotations found on the walls of the three buildings that comprise the Library of Congress—the world’s largest library and the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution.
While the bulk of “On These Walls” rightly focuses on one of the nation’s architectural masterpieces—the 1897 Thomas Jefferson Building—it does not neglect the important inscriptions and symbols in the 1938 John Adams Building and the 1980 James Madison Memorial Building.
“On These Walls” (Library of Congress in association with Scala Publishers), a 128-page softcover volume illustrated with more than 100 exquisite full-color photographs, is available for $19.95. For more on this book, see "News from the Center for the Book" on p. 186.
Fields of Vision: The Photographs of Russell Lee, Ben Shahn and Marion Post Wolcott
Selected images from the works of photographers Russell Lee (1903-1987), Ben Shahn (1898-1969) and Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990) are now featured in the first of three volumes in a new Library of Congress series titled “Fields of Vision.”
The more than 171,000 black-and-white and 1,600 color images that comprise the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) Collection at the Library of Congress offer a detailed portrait of life in the United States from the years of the Great Depression through World War II. Capturing people in both rural and urban regions of the country involved in the rhythms of daily life, the photographs allow viewers to connect personally with the 1930s and 1940s. The government documentary project, headed by Roy L. Stryker, employed many relatively unknown names like Lee, Shahn and Wolcott, who later became some of the 20th century’s best-known photographers.
Edited by Amy Pastan, an independent editor formerly with the Smithsonian Institution Press, each volume in the series includes an introduction to the work of the featured FSA photographer by a leading contemporary author or writer. Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, introduces Russell Lee; New York Times contributing columnist Timothy Egan writes about Ben Shahn; and Francine Prose focuses on Marion Post Wolcott.
The Library’s Prints and Photographs Division houses more than 14 million visual materials. More than 1 million digitized images are accessible on the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. These include the more than 172,000 images that comprise the FSA/OWI Collection. The collection’s 1,600 color images are also accessible through the Flickr online photo management and sharing application. Each 63-page soft-cover volume in the series is available for $12.95.
Eero Saarinen: Buildings from the Balthazar Korab Archive
“Eero Saarinen: Buildings from the Balthazar Korab Archive” is the seventh volume in the Norton/Library of Congress Visual Sourcebooks in Architecture Design and Engineering series. It is the first to focus on individuals: Saarinen (1910-1961), the mid-20th-century Finnish American architect who challenged the architectural conventions of his time; and Korab (1926–), a Hungarian-born architectural photographer whose images captured the brilliance of Saarinen’s designs.
The volume is edited by C. Ford Peatross, director of the Center for Architecture, Design and Engineering in the Library of Congress, and David G. De Long, professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. An introductory essay by De Long discusses the architect’s work within the broader context of his time.
The volume illustrates 19 of Saarinen’s commissioned designs in nearly 800 photographs drawn from Korab’s archive. Those projects include the General Motors Technical Center in Michigan, the Trans World Airlines Terminal at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport and Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia. Korab donated to the Library of Congress his original film transparencies and negatives for all of the images in the book.
The 464-page hardcover book is available for $100. An accompanying DVD contains high-quality downloadable images of all of the photographs and drawings in the book as well as direct links to the Library’s online catalogs and image files.
