What's New in the Prints & Photographs Division

Swann Fellow Lecture - Turkish Cartoons

Tuesday, June 1, noon.
Dining Room A, Madison Building, 6th floor

Swann Foundation Fellow, Yasemin Gencer, will present "Cartooning Progress: Secularism and Nationalism in the Early Turkish Republic (1922-28)." She will discuss how cartoons of this era had the power to create, shape and project a new Turkish national identity based on European models

Book Talk: Hard Luck Blues

Wednesday, June 2 , noon.
West Dining Room, Madison Building, 6th floor
Co-sponsored with the Center for the Book and the American Folklife Center

Author Rich Remsberg will discuss his work on visual representation of American roots music performance during the Depression era, featuring some 200 photographs from the Farm Security Administration Collection, including images by Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and Marion Post Wolcott.

More information

Three new "Fields of Vision" Books

Photographers Esther Bubley, Jack Delano, and John Vachon are featured in the most recent volumes in the "Fields of Vision" series, which highlight the work of Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information photographers during the Depression and World War II years.

More information [check to see if the 3 new are coming up]

Christy Mathewson, New York NL, at left and William Courtenay at right at the Polo Grounds, New York, ca. 1913.
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.14834

Who's out in the field?

Flickr member, TVL 1970, added to our understanding of this photo of Baseball Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson on the left shaking hands with actor (in uniform) William Courtenay. He pointed out that Courtenay was apparently featured in a Broadway play co-written by Mathewson, and he provided a link to the New York Times archive for more information on the production.

View comment in Flickr

Focus on the environment

An exchange of comments about this photo highlighted the history of environmental damage and restoration in the Ducktown region of Tennessee.

View image and comments in Flickr

Copper mining section between Ducktown and Copperhill, Tennessee. Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott, Sept. 1939.
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsac.1a34328

Ramallah peasant spinning wool. Hand-colored photograph, 1919.
LOT 13846, page 39, no. 20
LC-DIG-ppmsca-18417-00020

John D. Whiting Collection

A rich assemblage of more than 3,200 images made and gathered by Whiting, a photographer for the American Colony in Jerusalem, highlighting places, events, and people in the Middle East, and daily life in the American Colony, 1870 to 1951. Twenty-two of the albums in the collection have been digitized.

View a digitized album | View album description

Carol M. Highsmith's Alabama Photos

Join Carol M. Highsmith on her visual journey through Alabama. The first fifty images are available through PPOC, with more to come. Carol blogs about her experiences photographing in Alabama as part of her "Carol M. Highsmith's America" project.

View Alabama images | View Highsmith's blog

 Paper negative by William Langenheim Scanned

Paper negatives (also known as calotypes) were the first type of photographic negative, which made it possible to produce multiple prints of the same image. The digital image shows physical qualities of this early process. Langenheim, a Philadelphia-based photographer, was one of the few makers of calotypes in the U.S.

View description of the image | View description of the process

World War II Sketches by Victor A. Lundy -- An Overview

A visual diary with 158 pencil sketches brings to life the wartime experience of noted architect Victor A. Lundy, who served in the U.S. 26th Infantry Division during World War II in 1944.

View the Overview | View an Image Sampler (slide show)

Doris Ulmann - Photojournalist

An overview of the life and work of Doris Ulmann, who used her camera to provide socially meaningful images of people outside the rapidly industrializing American mainstream. These included Native Americans, African Americans, craftsmen, musicians, and members of religious communities, as seen in her Appalachian and Sea Island photographs.

View the overview

Looking at Pictures: An Invitation to the Prints and Photographs Collections at the Library of Congress

Barbara Orbach Natanson, Head of the Prints & Photographs Reading Room, provides an overview of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division holdings and tips for exploring the collections (6 minutes).

View Webcast

Online Exhibition: NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom

The Library of Congress commemorates African American History Month 2010 with the launch of a new site that initially features nearly 70 treasures from the NAACP'™s 100-year history. Featured in the exhibition are a number of photographs and other images from the collections of the Prints & Photographs Division.

View the exhibition

Cole, photographer.20th Annual session of the N.A.A.C.P., 6-26-29, Cleveland, Ohio."
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.05523

Silent Cities Project by Camilo J. Vergara

Master photographer Camilo José Vergara created his “Silent Cities Photograph Collection” in the mid 1970s-1980s. A sampler of 30 images is online, selected from the 800 slides encompassing 300 cemeteries throughout 21 states in North America and several European countries. The related book by Kenneth Jackson and Vergara is Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, c1989.

Charles Randall Dean Collection

This exceptional collection of 125 Abstract Expressionist prints from the 1940s to the 1960s includes work by such noted American artists as James Budd Dixon, Sonia Gechtoff, Philip Guston, Grace Hartigan, James Kelly, Lee Krasner, Frank Lobdell, and Hedda Sterne. The collection is a purchase and gift from Charles Randall Dean in 2009

“Cleared Hot!” Photographs

Master fine-art photographer Nicholas A. Price
spent 18 months, from 2005 to 2007, capturing
images of the men and women of the U.S. Air Force
to tell the story of their pride and dedication, stamina
and service. The resulting set of 60 photographs
is now in the Library of Congress collections.

View description