A Summer of Sharing

We mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we’d be playing a game called “What’s My Title?” at the National Book Festival (Sept. 22-23). I can testify that it was wildly successful–and great fun.

The "What's My Title?" game at the 2012 National Book Festival

The "What's My Title?" game at the 2012 National Book Festival

Hundreds of people stopped by to look at the five popular photographs we mounted on a wall, and many accepted the challenge of suggesting an appropriate title. Proposed titles ran the gamut: descriptive, witty, lyrical, and wistful. Observers also enjoyed marking their favorite suggestions with colored dots or simply discussing the various suggestions. By the end of each day, our “What’s My Title” board was festooned with colorful suggestions and polka dots!

Many thanks to all who participated in person or virtually. We’ll feature some of the most heavily stickered titles in upcoming blog posts.

Bronwen Colquhoun at the 2012 National Book Festival

Bronwen Colquhoun at the 2012 National Book Festival

The “What’s My Title?” game was the third in a series of “summer of sharing” activities that we enjoyed collaborating on with researcher Bronwen Colquhoun, a British Research Councils Fellow from Newcastle University who was based in the Library’s Kluge Center for four months. Her investigation of community engagement with photographic collections took us down several new and exciting paths:

  • In July, we hosted a “meet-up” in the Library of Congress Jefferson Building, launching the activity by posting a selection of Carol M. Highsmith’s photographs of the building to Flickr as inspiration.  It proved to be a wonderful opportunity to meet fellow photography enthusiasts and to mutually marvel at the architectural wonders of the Jefferson Building and the technical challenges of photographing it. Attendees photographed the building and shared more than 600 images on Flickr using the tag “LOCMeetup2012″ to enable people to find them.  We feature some of the wonderful photographs that resulted in LOC Meetup galleries on our Flickr account.
  • In August, we invited people to select ten favorite photographs from those we feature on Flickr, offering information about their selections through Flickr galleries.  More than twenty people took up the challenge, and we were fascinated by what caught their eyes and imaginations.
    Images in the "Your LOC Favorites" Library of Congress Flickr set

    Images in the "Your LOC Favorites" Library of Congress Flickr set

    We, in turn, formed a “Your LOC Favorites” Flickr set of the photographs that appeared in two or more galleries, along with links to all the individual galleries.  You’ll recognize some of the photos that appear in the set as the very ones we featured at the National Book Festival.

All of the sharing activities prompted us to look closer, to reflect more, and to appreciate the Library’s picture collections anew. We’re grateful to Bronwen for inspiring us to share images and the experience of looking at them in new ways, and we’re grateful to all who daily remind us how meaningful shared looking can be.

Learn more:

The National Book Festival – please join us!

The Prints & Photographs Division will be on hand at this weekend’s National Book Festival (Sept. 22-23).  If you’re planning on attending, please look for us in the LC Pavilion. Our focus will be “reading photographs,” and we’re inviting visitors to participate in a photo captioning game called “What’s My Title?” We’ll be displaying a …

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Child Labor Photos — What Do Children See?

Okay.  I admit it.  I put my children to work this summer. Recently, when doldrums threatened, I asked them to take a look at the Library’s National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) photographs online, choose some they found of interest, and tell me why. Working as an “investigative photographer” for the NCLC between 1908 and 1924, …

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P&P Snapshot: A Look at On Site Research

Our online collections support many a research project, but contact with physical photographs and graphic items can be eye-opening and reveal new avenues for investigation. Kya Mangrum, a doctoral candidate in English Language and Literature at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, recently spent several days in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room exploring images of …

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Caught Our Eyes: Tower Bridges in Boston, Massachusetts

This image, found while browsing for bridges in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, lured a colleague in for a closer look.  I was glancing over her shoulder, and the photograph drew me in and stirred my curiosity, too. We were struck by the clarity and beautiful geometry of the image, one of the recently …

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Words About Pictures: National Book Festival Visitor Comments

In a previous post (“Still Feeling the Glow: Photo Guessing Game at the National Book Festival,” Oct. 26), we described how we  brought copies of photographs from Prints & Photographs Division collections to the National Book Festival in September and asked visitors to participate in a “guessing game.”  We showed the pictures first with no …

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Still Feeling the Glow: Photo Guessing Game at the National Book Festival

The author signing lines have long disappeared and the tents have come down, but we are still reveling in the pleasures of sharing photos and  ideas about photos at the National Book Festival last month (Sept. 24-25).  We had hundreds of people stop by our table in the Library of Congress Pavilion to try our …

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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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