Portfolio 4: The World at Large

Latin America, the Caribbean, and Spain

Courret Hermanos, Fotografos. Lima. The Public Square on 28 July (Independence Day). Albumen silver print, probably 1868.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3905 (color transparency); LC-USZ62-87636 (b&w film copy neg.)

Although the history of photography in South America is only beginning to be written, it is clear that in the nineteenth century there were relatively few practicioners of such distinction as the Lima firm of Courret Hermanos. During its four or so decades of operation, the firm maintained a high standard of work and won numerous European competitions. This view of Lima's central square, festooned for an Independence Day celebration, is one of nearly 100 superbly printed albumen prints of Peru and Bolivia included in a two-volume souvenir album entitled Recuerdos del Peru. The Recuerdos contains several other views of Lima and its gardens, public works, and elegant buildings, views of smaller towns like Arequipa, Callao, and Arica, and portraits of gauchos, muleteers, bullfighters, and other people of the region. (Transfer, U.S. Department of State)

William Berryman. Woman Beating Cassava, Jamaica. Watercolor over grey ink and pencil on wove paper, circa 1808.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3072 (color transparency); LC-USZ62-102406 (b&w film copy neg.)

English artist William Berryman spent eight years on the West Indian island while it was under the colonial rule of Great Britain. During that time he produced over 300 pencil and watercolor studies of the people, flora, landscape, and buildings of the island, in preparation for an intended series of engravings. Berryman died before carrying out this ambitious and costly project, but his drawings were preserved in an album that was recently discovered and acquired by the Library. Of all his Jamaican subjects, the artist seems to have had a particular affection for the resident Africans and mulattoes freed when Great Britain ended slavery in her empire. Many of the descendants of this woman and her compatriots on the island's cotton and sugar plantations are now residents of Louisiana, New York, and other parts of the United States.

Eadweard Muybridge. Ruins of the Church of Santo Domingo, Panama. Albumen silver print, circa 1875.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3907 (color transparency)

In 1875 San Francisco photographer Eadweard Muybridge (later to become famous for his photographs of humans and animals in motion) traveled to the Isthmus of Panama. At that time Panama was part of Colombia, and Colombian President Juan Berrios was attempting to rejuvenate the coffee plantations by granting investment incentives to new and established growers. Muybridge braved the tropical climate and rainforest of much of Central America, photographing points of interest on the route of the Panama Railroad and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company's line. His efforts were financed by the Pacific Mail line, which hoped that publication of the photographs in North America would attract new investors to the region. This view of a group of Indian children in the shell of a seventeenth-century Spanish church on the isthmus is from an extensive archive of prints, photographs, and ephemera assembled by the Canal Zone Library. (Transfer, Canal Zone Library)

Diego Rivera. Zapata. Lithograph, 19 32.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3908 (color transparency)

Artists in postrevolutionary Mexico engaged in an effort to enshrine in Mexican history the revolution and its peasant leaders such as Emiliano Zapata. Supported by large-scale educational programs of the national government, Mexican artists like the European-trained Diego Rivera created an art based on indigenous Mexican forms, and accessible to a relatively unsophisticated people. Lithographs and woodcuts, relatively inexpensive types of prints, played an important role in popularizing this modern art in Mexico. (Pennell Fund purchase)

Jack Delano. Member of a Sugar Cooperative, vicinity of San Piedras, Puerto Rico, January 1942. Kodachrome transparency.
Reproduction #: LC-USF35-405 (color transparency); LC-USZC4-3909 (color transparency)

The Office of War Information carried on the work of the earlier Depression-era Farm Security Administration photographic project in surveying American agricultural and economic conditions and the efficacy of federal programs to improve these conditions. On his assignment to document Puerto Rican sugar growers, Jack Delano used the newly developed Kodachrome color transparency film. The work is part of the archive of over 190,000 photographic images produced under the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information photographic projects. (Transfer, Office of War Information)

Julio E. Suárez. Fiestas de Carnaval Montevideo 1942. Color lithograph poster.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3910 (color transparency)

When they arrived in Latin America, European, African, and Asian people brought with them diverse cultures, politics, and social mores. Festivals and Carnival became the loci around which this diversity of cultural heritage was blended into a rich, harmonious, and popular expression. Su rez emphasized that each celebration is a work of art in itself, with its own special dances, costumes, dramas, and music, melding a variety of religions, rituals, and cultures. (Gift of the Packer Outdoor Advertising Company)

Photographer unknown (A .B.C. Press Service). Scene during the Siege of Teruel, Spain. April 1, 1938. Gelatin silver print.
Reproduction #: LC-USZ62-112445 (b&w film copy neg.)

The Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939, sparked passionate interest among the international intellectual and political communities. The Communist government of the Spanish Republic was besieged by nationalist forces headed by Gen. Francisco Franco, who was backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The war was closely watched around the world, as the first major military contest between left-wing forces and the increasingly powerful and heavily armed Fascists. Here a republican soldier seeks cover on the Plaza de Toros, in Teruel, east of Madrid.

Arribas. 18 Julio 1936-1937. Color lithograph poster, 1937.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3911 (color transparency)

The intensity of the bitter conflict between republican and nationalist forces in Spain is reflected in this poster by the pseudonymous artist Arribas. The poster was produced for the two major Spanish labor organizations, the Union General de Trabajo and the Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo. It marked the first anniversary of the date on which nationalist leader Gen. Francisco Franco issued his antirepublican manifesto and launched his devastating military campaign against the Spanish Republic. The poster exploited indignation among industrial workers against the foreign-backed aggression in a rousing call to arms for republican volunteers. (Gift of the Packer Outdoor Advertising Company)

The Former Soviet States and Central Asia

Roger Fenton. Cavalry Camp, Church Parade. Albumen silver print, 1855.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3912 (color transparency); LC-USZ62-88052 (b&w film copy neg.)

The first war extensively recorded by the camera was the Crimean War, which pitted England, France, and Sardinia against Russia in the 1850s over control of the Black Sea province. British photographer Roger Fenton recorded the military camps, officers, and soldiers and the landscape of the theater of operations in the Crimea. Not entirely impartial, Fenton's undertaking was sanctioned by the British government, which was anxious to disprove gruesome reports of conditions in the Eastern theater issuing from the war's opponents at home. The prints in the Library's set of Fenton's Crimean photographs were inscribed and titled by the photographer.

N. V. Bogaevsk ii. A Leather Factory in Tashkent. Albumen silver print, 1871-72.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3913 (color transparency); LC-USZ62-82674 (b&w film copy neg.)

Military activity in Central Asia continued after the Crimean War. In 1867 Russia extended its control of Central Asia eastward across the Caspian Sea to the largely Islamic region of Turkestan. Populated by a variety of nomadic clans, the region had been long isolated from the rest of the modern world. The first Russian military governor, Konstantin Petrovich Von Kaufman, commissioned an encyclopedic photographic survey of the area's peoples, customs, culture, buildings, and monuments, designed to acquaint Westerners with the region, and possibly to serve as an orientation tool for new officials and the home office. The photographs from the survey were assembled in the four-volume Turkestanskii Al'bom, of which the Library's copy is one of only seven known sets.

Sergei Michailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Windmills in the Yalutorovsk. Recent color print from three-color separation negative, circa 1910.
Reproduction #: LC-P87-4610 (b&w glass neg.); LC-USZC4-3914 (color transparency)

On occasion, photography has served the interests of governments and rulers in surveying their domains and displaying the benefits of their regimes. On the eve of the Russian Revolution Czar Nicholas II of Russia commissioned a photographic survey of his empire by the educator and chemist Sergei Michailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. The product of the imperial charge was a comprehensive travelogue of Russia, the Ukraine, Siberia, and the Caucasus, and a milestone in the development of color photography.

Abdullah Freres. < cite>Life Saving Brigade Drilling. Albumen silver print, 1893.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3915 (color transparency); LC-USZ62-81186 (b&w film copy neg.)

The monumental fifty-one-volume photographic record of the realm of sultan Abdul Hamid II of Turkey, the last of the Ottoman Emperors, involved more than six photographic studios. The survey was directed by the sultan's court photographers, the three Armenian brothers who formed the Istanbul firm of Abdullah Freres. The work appears to have been conceived by the sultan as a portrait of his empire for the 1893 World Columbian Exposition, but was not exhibited there. It dwells on the accomplishments and westernizing improvements of the regime, such as the well drilled and equipped military, the technologically advanced lifesaving and fire fighting brigades, customs bureaucracy, and life at the lavish Imperial court. A copy of the survey was presented by Sultan Abdul-Hamid to the Library of Congress in 1894. (Gift of H.I.M. the Sultan Abdul Hamid II)

The Far East

Yoshitoyo Ut agawa. Picture of Americans' Love for Children. Color woodcut, 1860.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3916 (color transparency)

Japanese artists, working in the traditional idiom of the color woodcut, created a fascinating record of the encounter between their civilization and the West following Commodore Perry's opening of Japan to foreign trade in 1853. The Library's extensive collection of Japanese woodcuts includes many portrayals of British, Russian, Dutch, and American naval officers, diplomats and their families. These reflect the novelty of Western dress and ways, particularly the Victorian treatment of children, to the Japanese of the period. (Gift of Mrs. Emily Crane Chadbourne)

Photographer unknown (The Whiting View Company). Company of Boxers, Tien-Tsin, China. Stereograph, 1901.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3917 (color transparency); LC-USZ62-25864 (b&w film copy neg.)

The Opium Wars and Boxer Rebellion were violent products of nineteenth-century contact between China and the West. Although British operations in China during the period are well documented, few photographs of the Chinese Boxer troops survive. Originating in the mid-nineteenth century, the stereograph was an ancestor of the newsreel, affording Americans a window on the remote corners of the globe. The Library's collection of over 30,000 stereographs produced by such firms as Whiting, Underwood and Underwood, and the Keystone View Company spans the 1850s through World War I. (Transfer, U.S. Copyright Office)

Munetsugu Satomi. Japan. Color lithograph poster, 1937.
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-2312 (color transparency)

One of the acknowledged masters of Japanese poster design, Munetsugu Satomi created the vivid illusion of speed in this advertisement for the Japanese railroad. Born in Osaka, Japan, Satomi studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. This poster draws on the formal idiom of European Art Deco, indicating the designer's assimilation of the influence of French poster masters such as Cassandre.

The Middle East and Africa

Louis Hag he, after David Roberts. Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, 1839. Lithograph printed in colors. Published in George Croly and David Roberts, The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Egypt, and Nubia (London: F.G. Moon, 1842-49).
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3429 (color transparency)

The great sacred cities and sites of the Near East were fully illustrated for the first time in the monumental three-volume illustrated work by David Roberts, with descriptive text by the "orientalist" Reverend George Croly. Roberts, a self-taught Scottish scene painter, was praised for the accuracy and coloring of his drawings. Belgian printmaker Louis Haghe's portfolio of reproductions made after them were considered quite faithful to the originals, and a masterpiece in the art of lithography.

Lewis Larson. Surrender of the Mayor of Jerusalem to the British Army, December 9, 1917. Recent gelatin silver print from stereographic negative.
Reproduction #: LC-M32-1831 (b&w glass neg.)

Mayor of the city Hussein Hashim El-Husseini (with cane) walked along the Jaffa Road under a flag of truce made from half of a hospital bedsheet until he reached the first British outpost. There he surrendered the city to two British sentinels. The Matson Collection of photographs is part of an archive of 20,000 photographic negatives documenting people, places, and events of the Middle East from the turn of the century to World War II. (Gift of G. Eric Matson)

Félix Teynard. Le Kaire. Tombeaux de Sultans Mamelouks (Tomb of the Mameluke Sultans, Cairo). Salt print photograph, 1851-1852. Published in Égypte et Nubie, Sites et Monuments les plus Interessants pour l'Étude de l'Art et de l'Histoire (Paris: Goupil et Cie, 1858).
Reproduction #: LC-USZC4-3920 (color transparency)

In the mid-nineteenth century, a growing vogue for tourism led Americans and western Europeans to such exotic places as Greece, the Holy Land, and Egypt. Photographers exploited this trend by producing and marketing series and albums of souvenir views. Félix Teynard's photographic exploration of Egypt and Nubia in 1851-52 produced one of the earliest photographic records of the archaeological sites in this region. The sandy terrain and the weathered faces of the monuments that Teynard photographed are heightened by the surface texture of the photographic paper of the calotype process--one of the earliest processes for producing photographs on paper. Le Kaire is from a series of 160 photographs issued originally in installments and then as a complete collection in book form in 1858. The Library's copy is one of only twelve known complete copies that survive today.

Prints & Photographs Reading Room Home Page

Print and Photographic Collections in American Memory

Library of Congress Home Page