What's New in the Prints & Photographs Division

John Margolies' Roadside America

This new book offers appetizing samples of the photographs John Margolies made over the course of three decades, traveling more than 100,000 miles documenting fascinating examples of roadside advertising and fantasy structures. The Library of Congress will be hosting a symposium on roadside architecture next spring.

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Book Highlighting FSA Photographs of Music and Musicmaking

Rich Rembsberg's Hard Luck Blues presents more than two hundred photographs created by the Farm Security Administration during the Depression era. With an appreciation for the amateur and the local, FSA photographers depicted a range of musicians sharing the regular music of everyday life, from informal songs in migrant work camps, farmers' homes, barn dances, and on street corners to organized performances at church revivals, dance halls, and community festivals.

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Visual Sourcebook on Dams

Author Christine Macy explores these landscape-defining structures in a lavishly illustrated volume. Tracing the history of dam development in the United States, Macy analyzes the complex design and engineering challenges the structures posed. This is a recent addition to the Norton/Library of Congress series of Visual Sourcebooks in Architecture, Design & Engineering.

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Flickr Members Figure Out the What and When

Comments appearing under this photo provide a terrific example of how Flickr members build on each others' sleuthing and tap documents ranging from newspapers to film to pin down the nature of the event pictured (a funeral procession) and the date it occurred, providing context and further details along the way. Many thanks!

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Bramwell Booth at Gen. Wm. Booth's Funeral, 1912 Aug. 29.
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.11631

West Martingham, St. Michaels, Talbot County, Maryland . Photographic negative, 1936 or 1937.
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/csas.01933

Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South

Noted architectural photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston created a systematic record of early American buildings and gardens. Photographed primarily in the 1930s the collection includes more than 7,100 images showing an estimated 1,700 structures and sites in rural and urban areas of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, and to a lesser extent Florida, Mississippi, and West Virginia.

View all the images | View a slideshow

Farm Security Administration Negatives - New Scans Underway

The core of the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection consists of about 175,000 black-and-white negatives, about half of which half are on a nitrate film stock. The scans of the negatives made more than a decade ago are being replaced by new, high resolution scans that will enable researchers to view more detail in these documentary images from the 1930s and 1940s while at the same time reducing handling of the fragile negatives. More than 3,000 new scans are now online.

More information (FSA nitrate negatives) | View the images

 Matson Negatives All Available Online

All 22,000 negatives and transparencies from the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection are now available in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. More than 7,500 nitrate negatives were recently added to the images that were already online.

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Herblock's Early Cartoons Digitized

We have digitized Herblock's earliest 1,300 cartoons, from 1929 when he began working as a professional cartoonist until 1943 when he joined the United States Army during World War II. The cartoons provide Herblock's satirical take on events ranging from Chicago elections, the Great Depression, the presidencies of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the rise of Fascism in Europe, and World War II.

View Herblock images

Art rooms of Detroit Photographic Co., general view, 231 Woodward Ave., between 1900 and 1905.
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/det.4a20443

Detroit Publishing Company Negatives - New Scans Underway

More than 500 new scans made directly from Detroit Publishing Company Collection glass negatives improve upon the visual information available in online images for this collection of more than 25,000 photographs that we originally digitized in the early 1990s from intermediary film. Staff and researchers are in awe of the detail that surfaces in the new scans. More will be added.

View recently scanned images

Carol M. Highsmith- More Alabama Photos and Cuba

More than 3,900 images from Carol M. Highsmith's visual journey through Alabama are now online. Carol blogs about her experiences as part of her "Carol M. Highsmith's America" project.

View Alabama images | View Cuba images | View Highsmith's blog

Western Survey Photographs - Stereographs Overview and Checklists

Focusing on the stereographs taken by Timothy O'Sullivan, William Bell, and Andrew J. Russell for two surveys that spanned several years--the Clarence King explorations (1867-69, 1872), and the George M. Wheeler explorations (1871-1874), these checklists clarify the complex publishing history and dates for these fascinating pictures.

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Dissertations and Theses Using Prints & Photographs Division Collections, 2008-2010

The collections support a variety of research topics. We identified these dissertations and theses through contacts with researchers and by searching electronic resources. Did we miss yours? Please let us know. Send us a full citation through our Ask a Librarian online form.

View the bibliography

Liljenquist Family Collection

Close to 700 rare ambrotype and tintype photographs highlight Civil War soldiers and their families, both North and South. Tom Liljenquist donated the entire collection to the Library in 2010. An exhibition of these photographs will commemorate the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War in April 2011.

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.