Photographer in the Picture

Update 8/19/11: More inspiration! Some of the suggestions you made spurred thoughts of how we could commemorate two anniversaries:
•the opening salvos of the Civil War and the beginning of the ambitious photographic documentation effort that it triggered, and
•as we look back on 91 years of women's suffrage, ratified in the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution on Aug. 18, 1920, a visual salute to women's participation in the field of photography for an even longer period, from the pioneering work of Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude Kasebier to Carol M. Highsmith's documentation of American culture today.

Read more about taking photographs during the Civil War and about women photojournalists in the Prints & Photographs Division collections.

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Flickr members inspired this set!

You spotted a photographer caught in the headlights of George Grantham Bain's Stutz, and another changing a glass negative way in the background of a news photo–insight on the rigors of photography in the pre-digital era.

Prints & Photographs Division staff took up the challenge. We had a field day looking through our digitized collections and discovering even more photographers in reflections, in shadows, and in action. We took particular pleasure in the hunt for reflections—an invitation for very close looking, indeed. Check out the reflection in Geronimo's eye!

The earliest photos show signs of Timothy O'Sullivan at work on geographical surveys of the western United States. His equipment ("portable" by 1870s standards) lies on the ground in one photo; in another, his camera and tripod cast a long shadow in the sun-drenched ruins of Pueblo San Juan, New Mexico.

Photographers appear as shadows in many other locations, from American Colony photographers working in the Middle East and the photographer (likely Orville Wright) documenting an unsuccessful 1903 Wright Brothers flight, to Lewis Hine working on the streets of Indianapolis (where a well-placed shadow offered perspective on the small size of the child laborer he photographed) and Carl Mydans photographing for the Farm Security Administration in Lockland, Ohio.

You'll see one Farm Security Administration image that shows not only evidence of the photographer at work, but evidence of how the FSA office worked in its early days. Punching a hole in the negative meant "don't print this photo." Eventually, FSA staff adopted less drastic ways of indicating their selections. Fortunately, the FSA kept the negatives—even when hole-punched-- allowing us to see the entirety of the working file and to gain a sense, through the shadow cast by the photographer, of how the photographers worked in the field.

For actual portraits of photographers, we had plenty to choose from. Frances Benjamin Johnston, a pioneering woman photojournalist and architectural photographer, was active behind and in front of the lens. The one that includes both Johnston at work and a photographer's shadow earns double points.

We'll add more of our finds in the future. And, if you spot candidates among the Library’s photos on Flickr, keep letting us know, and we'll add them to the set!