Portfolio 1: An American Gallery

John Rubens Smith. Design for a 'Certificate issued by the Philadelphia Association for the Relief of Disabled Firemen'. Watercolor and graphite on wove paper. Circa 1830.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3673 (color transparency)

A versatile figure in the American art community during the first half of the nineteenth century, John Rubens Smith was an accomplished painter, an experienced printmaker, and a leading educator during a formative period in the development of American art. His many drawings of American scenes and people combine a high standard of draftsmanship and a fidelity to actual appearances remarkable for their time. Smith's drawing for a benevolent society certificate contains a wealth of rare detail on American firefighting technology and equipment during the Jacksonian period, from the elegantly functional pumpers to the colorful uniforms of the engine companies. (John Rubens Smith Collection. Gift of the Madison Council and Mrs. Joseph Carson)

Mathew B. Brady. Horace Greeley. Half-plate daguerreotype, circa 1850.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3888 (color transparency); LC-USZ62-110105 (b&w film copy neg.)

The feisty and eccentric New York editor Horace Greeley, known for his directive, "Go West, young man," personified the ebullient spirit of American Republican politics in the 1850s. In his hobnail boots, long coat, and stove-pipe hat, Greeley was a fixture of the New York scene. Brady made a career of photographing such public figures (for the exorbitant sum of three to five dollars apiece), and he displayed these portraits in his fashionable gallery at Broadway and Fulton Streets. "From the first, " Brady professed, "I regarded myself as under obligation to my country to preserve the faces of the historic men and mothers." This work is from an archive of over 300 Brady Studio daguerreotypes acquired by the Library in 1920. (Transfer, U.S. Army War College)

Anonymous. A Seamstress. Sixth-plate daguerreotype, circa 1853.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3598 (color transparency); LC-USZ6-2058 (b&w film copy neg.); LC-USZ62-106400 (b&w film copy neg.)

The unidentified subject of this daguerreotype sits behind an industrial model Grover and Baker sewing machine. Whether originally produced as a promotion for the machine’s manufacturer, an illustration of the clothing industry at the time, or a portrait of a proud seamstress displaying the tools of her trade, this daguerreotype is one of the few surviving visual documents of working women in the United States before the Civil War.

Arnold Genthe. Street of Gamblers. Toned gelatin silver print, circa 1898.
Reproduction #: LC-G403-139-B (b&w film neg.); LC-USZC4-3890 (color transparency); LC-USZ62-41901 (b&w film copy neg.)

Arnold Genthe's photographic studies of the people and streets of San Francisco's Chinatown before the earthquake of 1906 reveal something about Asian-American life and contemporary attitudes toward this immigrant group at the turn of the century. Emigration of the Chinese to the West Coast of the United States accelerated rapidly in the waning years of the nineteenth century. The Chinese were driven by the violence and hardships of the Opium Wars to the relatively safe haven and available employment offered by California. Genthe focused on the insular aspects of Chinatown life, eliminating by deft retouching of his negatives the telegraph lines and other signs of western technology. Genthe's studio archive of negatives and prints was acquired by the Library of Congress shortly after the photographer's death.

Edward S. Curtis. Shows as He Goes. Gelatin silver print, circa 1907.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3891 (color transparency); LC-USZ62-109701 (b&w film copy neg.)

From 1906 to 1927 Curtis traversed the western United States and British Columbia, studying and photographing the vanishing native American peoples and their many cultures. His project, largely financed by J. Pierpont Morgan, resulted in a monumental twenty-volume opus The North American Indian, which was illustrated with 1,500 photogravures. The Library owns a complete copy of this work, as well as an estimated 2,800 of Curtis's photographs. (Transfer, U.S. Copyright Office)

Gertrude Käsebier. The Red Man. Platinum print. Negative produced around 1900.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3892 (color transparency); LC-USZ62-67897 (b&w film copy neg.)

Unlike Edward Curtis, who methodically sought to record the dress, life, and customs of native Americans, Gertrude Käsebier photographed only a few Indians, Sioux members of Buffalo Bill's Wild West troupe whom she invited to pose in her New York studio. Käsebier was the finest portraitist of the American Pictorialist School, and in The Red Man her mastery of her idiom draws forth from the subject a strong psychological presence, at once imposing and reserved. (Gift of the photographer)

Lewis Hine. Shrimp and Oyster Worker, Biloxi, Miss. February 1911. Gelatin silver print.
Reproduction #: LC-USZ6-1306 (b&w film copy neg.); LC-USZ62-55649 (b&w film copy neg.)

Manuel, the five-year-old shrimp-picker shown here, spoke no English. At the time this photograph was taken, he had already worked for a year in this tedious and hazardous occupation. The abusive child labor practices of industry in pre-World War I America were the targets of the National Child Labor Committee, and photographer Lewis Hine was one of the committee's greatest publicists. For fifteen years he crisscrossed the United States documenting the practices of the worst offenders. The Library holds the papers of the National Child Labor Committee, including the reports, field notes, correspondence, and over 5,000 of Hine's photographs and negatives. (Gift of the National Child Labor Committee, in honor of the committee's fiftieth anniversary)

Ben Shahn. Years of Dust. Color lithograph poster, 1936.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-430 (color transparency); LC-USZ62-19225 (b&w film copy neg.); LC-USZ62-46931 (b&w film copy neg.)

A distinguished painter, illustrator, and photographer, Ben Shahn designed only a few posters during his long career. Years of Dust, produced for the Resettlement Administration (which later became the Farm Security Administration), is believed to have been his first. In conveying a sense of the despair of the impoverished Dust Bowl farmer, Shahn's poster was an apt piece of propaganda for the agency, which strove to ease the hardships of the American agricultural community.

Carl Van Vechten. Zora Neale Hurston. Gelatin silver print. 1938.
Reproduction #: LC-USZ62-79898 (b&w film copy neg.)

Now called the "literary grandmother" to black women writers, author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston was a major figure in the Harlem Renaisance of the 1920s and 1930s. Carl Van Vechten's portrait was taken the year after Hurston's most important novel, the folk romance Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published. Van Vechten, a writer and critic as well as an amateur photographer, was known as the "chronicler of Manhattan" and became an effective advocate of African-American music and letters. He bequeathed to the Library of Congress an archive of approximately 1,400 photographs of the artists, literati, and other celebrities of the period, from Josephine Baker to William Faulkner. (Gift of the photographer's estate)

Russell Lee. Buck Dancers at a Square Dance, Pie Town, New Mexico, June 1940. Gelatin silver print.
Reproduction #: LC-USF34-36912-D (b&w film neg.)

The photographic record of everyday life produced under the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression succeeded in generating support for New Deal economic and social programs and became a cornerstone of modern America documentary photography. (Transfer, Office of War Information)

Ansel Adams. Toyo Miyatake. Gelatin silver print, 1943.
Reproduction #: LC-A35-4-M-77 (b&w film neg.)

Under the Civilian Exclusion Order of 1942 over 100,000 western seaboard residents of Japanese descent were evacuated from their homes and relocated in internment camps in the interior. The order was conceived by the U.S. government during the hysteria following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in an effort to prevent sabotage of America's war effort. Toyo Miyatake, a Japanese photographer who was interned at the Manzanar camp, was photographed by Ansel Adams, who visited Manzanar at the invitation of the camp's director. Adams's visit resulted in the famous landscapist's only photo essay, the book Born Free and Equal (1944). Two copies were sent to Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, as part of the secretary's campaign to end the internments. Copies of the book were burned in protest by a public largely unreceptive to the idea of Japanese innocence. To safeguard the record for better times, Adams then deposited his Manzanar negatives in the Library of Congress. (Gift of the photographer)

Richard Avedon. The Chicago Seven. Gelatin silver print, 1969. (Not currently available due to copyright restrictions.)

Esteemed in both the art and commercial worlds, Richard Avedon photographed the Chicago Seven defendants during their tumultuous and protracted trial for the disruption of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The defendants were charged with conspiracy for their part in the antiwar demonstrations staged at the convention. The subjects are, from left: Abbie Hoffman, Lee Weiner, John Froines, Rennie Davis, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and David Dellinger.

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