Let Us Now Praise Famous Photo Albums: Walker Evans’ Albums for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

During the summer of 1936, Walker Evans, a preeminent photo documentarian of the New Deal, worked with writer James Agee on a project originally intended for Fortune magazine about the devastating effects of economic conditions on white tenant farmers. Agee and Evans spent eight weeks that summer researching their assignment, mainly among three white sharecropping …

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A Closer Look: Beware of Photos Bearing False Captions

When working with historical photo collections, it always pays to ask yourself: Does the title match the content?  The original photographers sometimes mixed up dates and places, or misspelled words and omitted key info — just like you or I might. Glancing at this pair of photographs, they seem to show the same scene. But …

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Kismet – Making Connections through Pictures

Recently I had one of those days when Prints & Photographs Division collections intersected with my personal life.  I came home to an exclamation from my daughter, who was trolling the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog for a school assignment: “Mom, the Office of War Information photographed my high school during World War II!” The …

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Recent Acquisition: Marilyn Church’s Courtroom Drawings

The tools of her trade are simple: colored pencils, crayons, pens, and paper. Yet, armed with just these tools artist Marilyn Church  has brought to life some of the most dramatic moments in high-profile courtroom trials during the past 36 years.  Her work has covered such well-known people as Martha Stewart, J.K. Rowling, Bernard L. Madoff, Jacqueline Onassis, the men …

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Photographer in the Picture

Catch the man – and the woman – behind the camera in a set of photographs recently added to the Library of Congress Flickr photostream. Drawn from multiple collections and ranging from the mid-1800s to the modern day, the Photographer in the Picture set shows photographers at work, sometimes catching them only in shadow or …

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Caught Our Eye: Sisters Who Weave

On September 26, 1859, sisters Lucretia Electa and Louisa Ellen Crossett stood before photographer Alfred Hall to have their portrait taken together in Lawrence, Massachusetts. I like to think of them as mill workers participating in the expanding American Industrial Revolution. The sisters, dressed in identical aprons, blouses, and simple jewelry, are both holding weaving …

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Welcome to Picture This!

The Picture This blog invites you to share our love of pictures and the stories they can tell. You’ll see special images that caught our eye and also learn about entire collections as we explore the vast holdings of the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress—more than 14.5 million photos, posters, cartoons, …

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