BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Library of Congress -- Exhibit: Not an Ostrich: & Other Images from America's Library

DC -- Library of Congress -- Exhibit: Not an Ostrich: & Other Images from America's Library:

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Description of Pictures: Not an Ostrich: & Other Images from America's Library
Opened March 23, 2022
NOT AN OSTRICH: & OTHER IMAGES FROM AMERICA’S LIBRARY, organized by the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles and drawn from the photography collections of the Library of Congress, presents a taste of this institution’s spectacular holdings of more than 14 million photographs. Selected images reproduced for this online exhibition were made between 1839 and today. They trace the evolution of photography, from daguerreotypes and other early processes to contemporary digital technology.
Organized into distinct sections, Not an Ostrich captures the great range of subjects available in the Library’s photographic collections, including portraits, the arts, sports, leisure, political and social issues, icons, panoramas, and business and science. Other sections highlight the distinct American visions from the archives of Carol M. Highsmith, Camilo José Vergara, and the Detroit Publishing Company.
Not an Ostrich includes famous pictures, famous subjects, and famous photographers. Many of the images capture glorious moments in our history, some are entertaining or even absurd, and others are deeply troubling. Some photos will give you new perspectives on celebrated places, faces, and events, while still others will literally open your eyes to unfamiliar moments in American culture and history.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. OSTRIC_220412_009.JPG: NOT AN OSTRICH: & OTHER IMAGES FROM AMERICA’S LIBRARY, organized by the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles and drawn from the photography collections of the Library of Congress, presents a taste of this institution’s spectacular holdings of more than 14 million photographs. Selected images reproduced for this online exhibition were made between 1839 and today. They trace the evolution of photography, from daguerreotypes and other early processes to contemporary digital technology. Organized into distinct sections, Not an Ostrich captures the great range of subjects available in the Library’s photographic collections, including portraits, the arts, sports, leisure, political and social issues, icons, panoramas, and business and science. Other sections highlight the distinct American visions from the archives of Carol M. Highsmith, Camilo José Vergara, and the Detroit Publishing Company. Not an Ostrich includes famous pictures, famous subjects, and famous photographers. Many of the images capture glorious moments in our history, some are entertaining or even absurd, and others are deeply troubling. Some photos will give you new perspectives on celebrated places, faces, and events, while still others will literally open your eyes to unfamiliar moments in American culture and history.
2. OSTRIC_220412_016.JPG: LAURA GILPIN. Indian bake ovens. Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, 1926 At the center of this photograph is a Native American horno, a Spanish mud adobe outdoor oven, which was initially used in North Africa, then gradually introduced to other Latin territories across the Americas. Packed with layers of straw and mud and formed into the shape of a beehive, it can be used to cook meats and vegetables, but one treat that is particularly traditional in the Southwest is pueblo oven bread.
3. OSTRIC_220412_022.JPG: MATTHEW PILLSBURY. Zero Hour. Mojave Desert, 7 p.m., Sunday, November 20, 2005 To launch Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in 2005, thousands of American “gamers” were invited to attend a private event in an aircraft hangar in the Mojave Desert. A huge crowd gathered outside until 7 p.m., when the doors opened and patrons rushed inside.
4. OSTRIC_220412_027.JPG: ADAM CLARK VROMAN. Library of Congress, Great Hall. 1900
5. OSTRIC_220412_035.JPG: EDWARD S. CURTIS. Inuit hut and family. Harriman Alaska Expedition, 1899 In the summer of 1899, railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman organized a scientific expedition to explore and document the Alaskan coast. In addition to the Harriman family, the expedition included a host of scientific, literary, and artistic luminaries, including the photographer Edward Curtis, who photographed Alaskan landscapes, Native Americans, and the activities of other members of the expedition.
6. OSTRIC_220412_040.JPG: JAMEY STILLINGS. “#8502, lvanpah Solar Plant.” California, 2012 Jamey Stillings documented the building of the lvanpah Solar Plant from before construction through completion. “I am looking,” he wrote, “from the air at a specific landscape in the Mojave that has changed radically over three years with construction, time of year, and the specifics of each day.” He hopes that, beyond their aesthetic appeal, the pictures will lead to questions and interest that transform viewer’s understanding about the nature of solar energy and its potential to encourage more careful choices about use of the Earth’s land and resources.
7. OSTRIC_220412_045.JPG: DRAHOMÍR JOSEF RŮŽIČKA. Pennsylvania Station. New York, New York, ca. 1930 In 1902 the architecture firm McKim, Mead, and White, known for buildings that defined America’s Gilded Age, were commissioned by the Pennsylvania Railroad to design a train terminal in Manhattan. Completed in 1910, the gigantic steel and stone building covered four city blocks. Pennsylvania Station was both an engineering feat and a voluminous architectural structure of luminous light that was torn down in 1963.
8. OSTRIC_220412_050.JPG: Built Environment Photographs of a single building record vital information about scale, materials, purpose, and context. Is it a shop, a church, a residence, a courthouse, a gas station, or an inventive roadside attraction? The Library’s collection of architectural photographs spans centuries. Images taken by renowned artists, talented professionals, and sharp-eyed amateurs. An assembly of such breadth and depth offers an invaluable tool for understanding the evolution of America’s built environment and, by default, the country’s growth from a fragile young nation to a world power. In this exhibit, buildings range from the illustrious U.S. Capitol to an Inuit’s summer home constructed of seal or caribou skins stretched over a frame of driftwood or whale bone. And although most buildings have a modest life span, even the commanding beauty of New York’s Pennsylvania Station—artistically captured by the Czech immigrant Drahomífr Růžička—was torn down to build a new train station that will also soon be replaced. Less orderly and more violent destruction of cities was wrought between 1889 and 1904 by three historic disasters: The Johnstown Flood (1889) that killed more than 2,200 people; the Galveston hurricane (1900) that killed 6,000 to 12,000 people; and the Great Baltimore Fire (1904) during which more than 1,500 buildings burned.
9. OSTRIC_220412_060.JPG: Camilo José Vergara For four decades, Camilo José Vergara has photographed select American cities, focusing on inner-city life that he considers “invisible” to large segments of America’s population. His thousands of images—made between 1970 and the present day—record the urban decay that blights neighborhoods in New York, Detroit, Newark, Camden, Chicago, and Los Angeles, but he also sees life and vibrancy—children playing (in rubble, at times), shop owners proudly posed in their stores, and community gardens. He also concentrates on the powerful murals created to express political views and to identify tastes in music and heroes. As a trained sociologist, Vergara plots change by returning at regular intervals to photograph the same buildings, thus calling viewers’ attention to the economic fragility of inner-city businesses. In his book Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto (2013) Vergara wrote that “Harlem was like a run-down version of Paris where life was lived on the streets . . . . I felt a people’s past—their accomplishments, failures and aspirations—were not reflected in their faces but in the material world in which they lived and which they helped to shape.”
10. OSTRIC_220412_063.JPG: CAMILO JOSÉ VERGARA. 65 East 125th St., Harlem. New York, 1977–2017 65 East 125th St. in Harlem, New York, which Camilo Vergara first photographed in 1977, has changed its exterior with each new occupant every two to four years—from a restaurant to a variety store to a kitchen cabinet shop, and then, to a grocery store that survived for almost a decade. The cycle continued with a clothing store that morphed into a mattress retailer, until it recently became a church.
11. OSTRIC_220412_074.JPG: Carol M. Highsmith In her mid-30s, Carol M. Highsmith switched from a successful career in broadcasting to become a professional photographer. In the last 40 years, Highsmith has made more than 50,000 photographs working in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. She has focused on landscapes and architecture in both urban and rural America, with added interest in people and their work environments. She has also traveled the country widely to document folk art sculpture, festivals, and roadside landmarks, such as the tipi motel on Route 66. Working primarily in vibrant colors, her vision is upbeat. She uses beauty, humor, and humanity as her guiding view of America. Highsmith’s first extended project documented the 1970s transition along Pennsylvania Avenue as the buildings between the White House and the Capitol were restored from states of decay to worthy structures in a historic neighborhood. That project became her first gift to the Library of Congress in 1992. Thus began a series of major donations from throughout her career, including her documentation of the Library of Congress buildings and her ongoing America project. Highsmith’s photographs, a former Library curator noted, have created “a permanent record of the country and its people for the common good.”
12. OSTRIC_220412_077.JPG: CAROL M. HIGHSMITH. Dazzling store window. New Orleans, Louisiana, 2008
13. OSTRIC_220412_080.JPG: Detroit Publishing Co. Founded in the 1890s, the Detroit Publishing Company became one of the major photography publishers in the world. Decades before there was economically feasible color film stock, the company acquired exclusive North American rights to use a photographic process called Photochrom to convert black-and-white photographs into color images. This allowed the company to mass produce and widely distribute color postcards and prints. The company specialized in American and European subjects, including cityscapes and architecture of historical note, such as Trinity Church in New York and Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Among the natural landmarks the firm photographed are Niagara Falls (in both a fluid and frozen state), Umbrella Rock on Lookout Mountain in Tennessee, and Balanced Rock in the Garden of the Gods, Colorado. The corporation’s professional photographers recorded events and scenes that tourists would want to send home as well as daily sights, such as laundry drying on lines between apartments in New York. The Library of Congress holds more than 25,000 glass negatives and transparencies as well as 20,000 photographic and photomechanical prints, including about 300 color photolithograph prints published by the Detroit Publishing Company.
14. OSTRIC_220412_083.JPG: CAROL M. HIGHSMITH. Gator alert. Henderson, Louisiana, 2014
15. OSTRIC_220412_091.JPG: CAROL M. HIGHSMITH. Casino Boat on the Mississippi River. Natchez, Mississippi, 2008
16. OSTRIC_220412_099.JPG: DETROIT PUBLISHING CO. Horseshoe Falls from Canadian side. ca. 1900
17. OSTRIC_220412_104.JPG: DETROIT PUBLISHING CO. Mississippi River landing. Memphis, Tennessee, 1906
18. OSTRIC_220412_108.JPG: DETROIT PHOTOGRAPHIC CO. [later Detroit Publishing Co.] George Ohr and interior of his pottery studio. Biloxi, Mississippi, 1901
19. OSTRIC_220412_125.JPG: Icons This section features “first-ever” photographs, the Library’s most requested images, and iconic documentary and photojournalistic pictures, including Robert Cornelius’s 1839 “selfie” and the earliest-known portraits of Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Tubman. Some of these iconic records have been continually published since they were taken; others were rediscovered having previously been lost to history. Dorothea Lange’s enduring portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, a destitute mother of seven children, has touched viewers since it was made in 1936. It is one of the most recognizable images in the Library’s collections. Gordon Parks’s portrait of Ella Watson addresses issues of racism by parodying another icon—Grant Wood’s painting of an American farm family. The photograph of Orville and Wilbur Wright’s first flight provokes our imagination to wonder what it was like to conceive and develop an operable airplane and become the first man to fly. Veterans might identify with the camaraderie between future president Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders after their victory at the Battle of San Juan Hill. Finally, there is the deadly violence captured by Murray Becker in the explosion and crash of the airship Hindenburg and the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by John Filo of Mary Ann Vecchio as she kneels over the body of Jeffrey Miller, fatally during a protest Kent State University. These last four photographs capture historical events but continue to engage audiences long after those events were news.
20. OSTRIC_220412_128.JPG: GORDON PARKS. American Gothic. Washington, D.C., 1942 In his series, Ella Watson, U.S. Government Charwoman, Parks posed Watson in the manner of Grant Wood’s 1930 painting of Iowa farmers titled American Gothic. Parks “followed her for nearly a month—into her home, her church, and wherever she went.” Speaking later of this series Parks said, “What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, the discrimination and the bigotry, by showing the people who suffered most under it.”
21. OSTRIC_220412_135.JPG: ATTRIBUTED TO NICHOLAS H. SHEPHERD. Abraham Lincoln, congressman-elect from Illinois. 1846 or 1847 This image, made from a daguerreotype, is the earliest-known photograph of Abraham Lincoln, taken at age 37 when he was a frontier lawyer in Springfield and U.S. congressman-elect from Illinois.
22. OSTRIC_220412_137.JPG: JOHN T. DANIELS. Orville Wright’s First Flight. Distance: 120 feet. Time: 12 seconds. Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, December 17, 1903 The first powered, controlled, and sustained flight was photographed with Orville Wright at the controls, lying prone on the lower wing, his hips in the cradle that operated the wing-warping mechanism. Wilbur Wright, running alongside to balance the machine, has just released his hold on the forward upright of the right wing. The starting rail, the wing-rest, a coil box, and other items needed for flight preparation are visible behind the machine. (Orville Wright preset the camera and had John T. Daniels squeeze the rubber bulb, tripping the shutter.)
23. OSTRIC_220412_153.JPG: DOROTHEA LANGE. Migrant Mother. Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age 32. This is among the Library of Congress’s most requested images. In Nipomo, California, Dorothea Lange, who worked for the Resettlement Administration (a New Deal program created to assist low-income families), came upon a family whose car had stalled outside of a pea pickers camp. Lange approached the stranded woman in a tent surrounded by some of her seven children and took six exposures. Lange’s later director, Roy Stryker, referred to the Migrant Mother as the “ultimate photo of the Depression Era.” In subsequent decades, artists have copied the mother and children but given them the features of other ethnicities, making the mother’s burdens universal. Florence Owens Thompson, the original Migrant Mother, was Native American.
24. OSTRIC_220412_157.JPG: BENJAMIN F. POWELSON. Harriet Tubman carte-de-visite. 1868 or 1869 Born into slavery in 1822, Harriet Tubman freed herself in 1849 through the Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes and safe houses used by slaves to escape to free states. Over the next decade, she returned to Maryland to rescue members of her family, and later, enabled around 300 other enslaved people to reach freedom despite the bounty offered for her capture. In 1859, Tubman purchased land and moved to Auburn, New York, then purchased 25 acres adjacent to her property in 1891 to build a retirement home for African Americans. This previously unknown portrait taken when Tubman was 48 or 49 years old, appears in an album assembled by abolitionist, educator, and philanthropist Emily Howland. The album is now jointly owned by the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture.
25. OSTRIC_220412_164.JPG: WILLIAM DINWIDDIE. Colonel Roosevelt and his Rough Riders after victory in the Battle of San Juan. Cuba, 1898 On July 1, 1898, U.S. forces, including future President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, defeated the substantially larger Spanish forces at San Juan Hill and Kettle Hill near the Spanish stronghold of Santiago de Cuba. The victory allowed the United States to begin a siege of Santiago, which led to Spanish surrender and the end of the Spanish-American War. No regiment was celebrated more than the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, better known as the Rough Riders, which included western cowboys, college students, and Native Americans, aided by Black cavalrymen. Mr. Roosevelt had resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy at the outbreak of the war to form the regiment and take part in the fighting. Roosevelt later recalled the “charge itself was great fun” and “we had a bully fight.”
26. OSTRIC_220412_168.JPG: ROBERT CORNELIUS. Self-portrait. 1839 This image is believed to be the earliest extant American portrait photograph and therefore “the first selfie.” In October 1839, only two months after Louis Daguerre publically announced his photographic process, a young Philadelphian, Robert Cornelius, who worked in his family’s lamp and chandelier store, built his own camera using a box fitted with a lens from an opera glass. Because the daguerreotype process required a lengthy exposure that could take as long as thirty minutes, he took advantage of the light in his back yard to make this head-and-shoulders self-portrait.
27. OSTRIC_220412_176.JPG: Social, Political, & Religious Life Many photographs in the Library of Congress focus on social and political issues including rich collections documenting the quest for civil rights. Some of the collection’s photographers addressed social epidemics such as drug abuse and poverty, hoping to raise public awareness and instigate corrective action. For instance, Donna Ferrato’s series on domestic violence played an important role in Congress passing the 1994 Violence Against Women Act. Other photographers focused less on society’s ills and more on its sweeter moments. These images range from a messenger riding a big wheel bicycle down the steps of the U.S. Capitol to Susana Raab’s Chicken in Love, which depicts a woman holding hands with someone in a chicken suit. The Library also has a rich representation of photographs related to religions and beliefs, including a nineteenth-century faith healer, Apache devil dancers, Catholic nuns, Protestant evangelists, and Muslims. The Library has vast photographic documentation on military life since the Civil War. For example in this exhibition, different aspects of the military are represented by a portrait of an African American soldier and his family made during the Civil War, a photo of 21,000 men who stood together to create a giant portrait of President Woodrow Wilson, veterans sleeping rough near the nation’s Capitol the night before their protest march down Pennsylvania Avenue, and images of civilian life for veterans who were severely injured in Afghanistan and Iraq.
28. OSTRIC_220412_178.JPG: KATHERINE TAYLOR DODGE. Apache Devil Dancers. Southwestern United States, ca. 1899 Katherine Taylor Dodge photographed Native Americans and other subjects in Arizona in the late 1890s. The devil or crown dance, performed primarily by Mescalero and Chiricahua Apache in the Southwest, is a very old and sacred dance that the Apaches believe was taught by the mountain spirits as a means of healing. The four Crown dancers are masked and wear distinctive headdresses. They represent the four cardinal directions—north, south, east, and west. The fifth dancer is the clown who protects the others by driving away evil spirits.
29. OSTRIC_220412_183.JPG: ABEL & COMPANY. New York book campaign for military personnel. New York, New York, 1919 A woman stands on a tower of books in front of the New York Public Library soliciting book donations for soldiers in World War I. From 1917 to 1920, the American Library Association and its affiliates distributed between seven and ten million books and magazines and established roughly thirty-six libraries at camps across the United States and in Europe.
30. OSTRIC_220412_188.JPG: STEPHEN DUPONT. “Line Sgt. John Ingels, Mortar Section, Death Dealers.” Afghanistan, 2009 In 2009, Stephen Dupont embedded with the members of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade while they were based in Afghanistan. In his journal from that time, Dupont describes daily life, foot patrols, weapons searches, supply runs, and Afghan people. He also included fifty-two instant Polaroid photographs showing portraits of marines, along with each man’s handwritten responses to the question “Why am I a Marine?”
31. OSTRIC_220412_193.JPG: OSCAR GRAUBNER. Margaret Bourke-White on Chrysler Building. New York, New York, 1930 At the start of her career, Margaret Bourke-White moved to New York to become a commercial photographer and a staff photographer for Fortune Magazine in 1929. Among her early jobs was photographing the Chrysler Building as it rose to briefly become New York’s tallest structure. When workmen began to construct the building’s modern gargoyles off the sixty-first floor, Bourke-White decided “here would be my new studio. . . I loved the view so much that I often crawled out on the gargoyles, which projected over the street 800 feet below, to take pictures of the changing moods of the city.” This photograph, taken by her darkroom technician, came to epitomize Bourke-White’s fearless determination.
32. OSTRIC_220412_197.JPG: Photographers Pictures of photographers are a particular delight to be found in the Library’s collection, including both self-portraits and images made by colleagues. Looking for patterns, there seems to be a shared desire to impress viewers with the risks they took to get a photograph. Degrees of jeopardy represented include one of the Kolb brothers hanging from a rope over the Grand Canyon, an anonymous man with his camera and tripod inching toward the edge of Glacier Point in Yosemite, and the aerial barnstormer “Jersey” Ringel standing on the wing of a moving airplane. The desire to be perceived as a risk taker even led actress Esther Lyons to insert herself into images of Alaskan campsites and falsely claim in public that she was part of the expedition in the photograph when, in fact, she was never in Alaska at the time. S. W. Fallis specialized in making spirits seemingly appear around his sitters as part of a popular spirit photography fad in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. A. B. Phelan seemingly created a modern version of the land of giants in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). But it is without tricks, and probably without awareness, that one of the Gerhard sisters captured her own reflection in the eye of the legendary Apache warrior Geronimo at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904.
33. OSTRIC_220412_203.JPG: DANNY LYON. Clifford Vaughs, a SNCC photographer is arrested, torn between troops and demonstrators. Cambridge, Maryland, 1964 Brooklyn native Danny Lyon is one of the most influential documentary photographers of the post-war generation. With a few select others, Lyon forged a new style of documentary in which the photographer immerses himself in his subject’s world and does not feign being “objective” about what he photographs. The groups in which he was immersed included the Chicago Outlaws, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and men in Texas prisons, all of which are represented in different sections of this exhibition.
34. OSTRIC_220412_205.JPG: KOLB BROS. Grand Canyon suspension. Arizona, 1908 A photographer (probably Emery or Ellsworth Kolb) dangles from rope in a canyon crevasse as an assistant keeps watch above.
35. OSTRIC_220412_213.JPG: PAUL FUSCO. Grape Picker. California, 1966 “I want the viewers to be moved into the lives of the people that they are looking at [so that] the visual experience is incredibly emotional,” said Paul Fusco, who worked for LOOK magazine from 1957 to 1971. This exhibition includes work from two of Fusco's assignments for LOOK. For a 1966 story on Cesar Chavez, a co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association, Fusco focused on Chavez’s fight for the California grape pickers’ working conditions. For this photograph of a grape picker, Fusco lay on the ground to convey the difficulties of working under the prickly grape vines. In 1968 Fusco rode Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train, photographing the crowds waiting along the railroad tracks to see the train pass on its way from California to New York.
36. OSTRIC_220412_219.JPG: UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. “How the Octopus Was Caught” from “Harriman Alaska Expedition: Chronicles and Souvenirs.” Harriman Alaska Expedition. May to August 1899 This page is from the private souvenir album created collectively by the members of the scientific expedition along the Alaskan coast, funded and accompanied by railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman in the summer of 1899. The album includes maps, photographs, paintings, poems, song lyrics, and prose, reflecting participants’ experience of the beauty of the scenery, their perceptions of wildlife, of Native peoples and customs, their scientific field observations, interpersonal relationships, and patriotic celebrations on the Fourth of July.
37. OSTRIC_220412_224.JPG: Science & Business The Library of Congress holdings related to business and science range from the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers to single views of modest establishments, such as Banana Burt’s Dairy Queen in Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts. Photographs have recorded everything from the path of food from farm to market to home, the cutting down of giant Sequoia trees for lumber, the mass inoculations against the polio virus in 1952, and the sale of tofu hot dogs by Playboy Playmates in 2007. Soon after the medium’s invention, photographs were used by businesses and individuals for promotional purposes. Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Tubman recognized photography’s value in advancing themselves and their ideas. Photographs of theatrical actors and actresses promoted their plays, and later, their movies. The 1926 Miss America found herself demonstrating a permanent hair wave machine that hints at the influence of Dr. Frankenstein. The Library’s collection is also rich in portraits of nineteenth-century wage earners such as a seamstress seated at the then new Grover and Baker industrial sewing machine and a feather duster salesman in Chicago. There are portraits of business titans such as Bell at the opening of the long-distance telephone line from New York to Chicago in 1892 and of Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph and Morse code.
38. OSTRIC_220412_228.JPG: MICHAEL A. “TONY” VACCARO. Architectural hats. New York, New York, 1960 After service in World War II during which Tony Vaccaro photographed as well as fought, he worked for major U.S. magazines, including Flair and LOOK before joining Life. He established himself as a celebrity and fashion photographer. This photograph was part of an article in LOOK on “architectural hats,” for which hats were created to match buildings, such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
39. OSTRIC_220412_232.JPG: UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD. Where Fortunes are Made and Lost Overnight. Burkburnett, Texas, 1920 Although oil was found by Native Americans in Texas before the first Europeans arrived, the discovery of the Spindletop salt dome oil deposits in 1901 established Texas as a major oil producing state. Between 1911 and 1929, more discoveries were made throughout the state. The Burkburnett field opened in 1918, yielding a standing army of drilling towers extending to the horizon two years later.
40. OSTRIC_220412_236.JPG: DETROIT PHOTOGRAPHIC CO. [later Detroit Publishing Co.] Cotton Gin. Mississippi, 1897 In 1793, U.S.-born inventor Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, a machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber. By the mid-nineteenth century, cotton had become America’s leading export.
41. OSTRIC_220412_240.JPG: UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. “Not an Ostrich—But the Oddly Plumed ‘Floradora Goose’” New York, New York, 1930 The prize-winning “Floradora goose” was displayed at the 41st annual Poultry Show in Madison Square Garden. A rare goose, decorated with fluffy un-gooselike feathers, is held by British actress Isla Bevan, a cast member of Noel Coward’s operetta Bitter Sweet that opened at the Ziegfeld Theatre on November 5, 1929.
42. OSTRIC_220412_251.JPG: TONI FRISSELL. Jacqueline Bouvier and John Kennedy on their wedding day. Newport, Rhode Island, 1953 More than eight hundred guests attended the wedding of Jacqueline Bouvier and the newly elected Senator John F. Kennedy, which was held at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Newport, Rhode Island. An additional four hundred guests were invited to the reception and it took Senator and Mrs. Kennedy two hours to shake their hands. The wedding cake, four feet tall, was ordered by the groom’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy.
43. OSTRIC_220412_258.JPG: POSSIBLY BY EMMA J. FARNSWORTH. Untitled. 1890–1910 This image was acquired by photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston, who collected, exhibited, and advocated work by women photographers. In her 1897 article for Ladies Home Journal, “What A Woman Can Do With A Camera,” she wrote, “Learn early the immense difference between the photography that is merely a photograph, and that which is also a picture.” She organized an exhibition and lectured on art photos by women for the International Congress of Photography, held in Paris in 1900. The exhibition included the work of Pictorialist photographers Gertrude Käsebier and Emma J. Farnsworth.
44. OSTRIC_220412_263.JPG: Portraits Photographic portraits can group or isolate subjects, be posed in formal or casual ways, and be intimate or public. Subjects can be famous or anonymous. If we know the subject, we want a good likeness. But if a photographer captures someone whose image intrigues us or inspires us to emulate them, being familiar with the sitter doesn’t matter. We can feel sympathy for the father caressing his dying son, or joy for the father beaming at his angelic daughter, without knowing their names. We might speculate on a subject’s character, style, age, or worth. The Library of Congress seeks out as much information as possible about the photographs it acquires, including the names of the photographers and the subject(s), as well as when and why the picture was made. It pursues photographs of those recognized for their accomplishments in sports, culture, business, politics, and many other pursuits. The Library also collects the works of photographers who are famous as portraitists. In addition, it also has sought dynamic images of less famous, even anonymous, people of all ages, genders, ethnicities, and stations in life. Occasionally the Library staff is aided by other researchers or by someone who might see a picture online and exclaim, “That’s my grandfather!”
45. OSTRIC_220412_267.JPG: DORIS ULMANN. Maum Duck (Mrs. Doctor). South Carolina, ca. 1929–1931 In an interview, Ulmann referred to her particular interest in portraits. “The faces of men and women in the street are probably as interesting as literary faces, but my particular human angle leads me to men and women who write. I am not interested exclusively in literary faces, because I have been more deeply moved by some of my mountaineers than by any literary person. A face that has the marks of having lived intensely, that expresses some phase of life, some dominant quality or intellectual power, constitutes for me an interesting face. For this reason the face of an older person, perhaps not beautiful in the strictest sense, is usually more appealing than the face of a younger person who has scarcely been touched by life.”
46. OSTRIC_220412_274.JPG: LAURA GILPIN. Mrs. Francis Nakai. New Mexico, 1932 One of the foremost American photographers of the Southwest, Laura Gilpin studied with Clarence White in New York in 1918. She returned to her native Colorado Springs to begin her professional photography career, making soft-focus landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. Gilpin gradually adopted a more hard-edged style to document the southwestern landscape and members of Pueblo and Navajo tribes. Her images depict Native Americans with simplicity and grace, living in an intimate relationship with the land.
47. OSTRIC_220412_280.JPG: UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. Queen Liliuokalani, last queen of Hawaii. ca. 1891 Hawaii was a unified and independent kingdom from 1810 until 1893. It was ruled by six kings in the Kamehameha dynasty until 1891. With the death of her brother, Liliuokalani was proclaimed queen, but her reign was short lived. In January 1893, a coup led by Sanford Dole took over the Hawaiian government and pressed the U.S. government to annex the islands. Two years later, after a failed insurrection by Queen Liliuokalani’s supporters to return power to Hawaiian royal rule, she was charged with treason and put under house arrest. In exchange for a pardon for her and her supporters, she resigned. The queen also composed more than 160 songs during and after her reign.
48. OSTRIC_220412_283.JPG: STANLEY KUBRICK. Bodybuilder Gene Jantzen with wife Pat and 11-month-old son Kent. 1947 A chubby child who was often bullied, Jantzen began bodybuilding when he was 12 years old. In his teens he ran 18 miles a day and added a 14-mile swim to his regime during the summer months. Through high school and college he continued to train, competed in swimming and gymnastics, and won the “Finest Physique in America Contest” in 1947. Jantzen, who worked as a corrective therapist for 50 years, was the father of 10 children, and lived until he was 89 years old.
49. OSTRIC_220412_289.JPG: WILL WILSON. Eric Garcia Lopez, Citizen of Tarasco First Nation, Dancer, Indigenous Contemporary Dance Creations. 2012 Will Wilson is a Diné photographer who spent his formative years living in the Navajo Nation. In describing his photographs, Wilson wrote, “I am impatient with the way that American culture remains enamored of one particular moment in a photographic exchange between Euro-American and Aboriginal American societies: the decades from 1907 to 1930 when photographer Edward S. Curtis produced his magisterial opus The North American Indian. For many people even today, Native people remain frozen in time in Curtis photos. . . . I seek to do something different. I intend to resume the documentary mission of Curtis from the standpoint of a 21st century indigenous.”
50. OSTRIC_220412_294.JPG: DAWOUD BEY. Fred Stewart and Tyler Collins, Birmingham Museum of Art. Birmingham, Alabama, 2012. (From the series Birmingham: Four Girls, Two Boys) This series commemorates the death on September 15, 1963, of four young girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and two boys shot later. The girls and boys in these photographs are the same ages today as the murdered children were in 1963, and the adults are the ages the children would be had they survived the ensuing fifty years.
51. OSTRIC_220412_298.JPG: NICHOLAS NIXON. Joey Brandon with his parents, Everett and Zana Cloyd. Boston, Massachusetts, 1987. (From the series People with AIDS) In a 2016 interview, Nicholas Nixon said: “Most of the people with AIDS that you saw in the newspapers and on television looked pretty bad, that sort of look that people get when they’re near the end, that I think it makes it easy for people who aren’t sick to sort of shun. . . . That just seemed not fair to me, and so I sort of figured, well, maybe my process of [photographing] individuals might make one-tenth of one-hundredth of a percent of difference and change people’s minds.”
52. OSTRIC_220412_305.JPG: Chief Crane, Potawatomi, holding tomahawk and unidentified Native American man in delegation to Washington, D.C., between 1855 and 1865. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (59.00.00) Enlarge Previous 12 of 14 Next All Objects UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. Chief Crane, Potawatomi, and unidentified Native American man in delegation. Washington, D.C., between 1855–1865 By 1820, the Potawatomi Nation covered northern and central Illinois, southeastern Wisconsin, northern Indiana, southern Michigan, and northwestern Ohio. A series of land cedes to the U.S. government, starting in 1807, forced the tribe off some of their land. Removing the tribe to land west of the Mississippi occurred between 1834 and 1842. A forced, two month march in the fall of 1838, “The Trail of Death,” led 850 Potawatomi 660 miles from northern Indiana to Kansas. More than 40 people died, mostly children. While a few Potawatomi were able to remain in Wisconsin, most ended up in Iowa and Kansas, some went on to Texas and others to Canada. The purpose of this delegation to Washington is unknown.
53. OSTRIC_220412_313.JPG: SAMUEL MASURY. Frances Clalin: Woman who served as a Union soldier in the Civil War—4 months heavy artillery, Co. I, 13 months; Cavalry Co. A, 22 months. ca. 1865 Clalin is one of an estimated 250 women who dressed as men to fight in the Civil War. A mother of three, Clalin enlisted in Missouri as “Jack Williams,” alongside her husband Elmer Clayton, in the fall of 1861. They fought side by side until he was killed just a few feet in front of her at the Battle of Stones River on December 31, 1862. Clalin fought in seventeen battles, was injured three times and taken prisoner once.
54. OSTRIC_220412_320.JPG: UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. Possible Choctaw American Indian. ca. 1850s
55. OSTRIC_220412_332.JPG: Panoramas Panoramic views were made soon after photography’s invention by taking a series of photographs and placing them edge to edge to record a sweeping landscape or a wide city view. In the late nineteenth century, cameras were created specifically to produce seamless panoramas. These were either swing-lens cameras, where the lens rotated while the film remained stationary, or 360-degree rotation cameras, where both the camera and the film rotated. The Library of Congress has a significant collection of more than 6,000 panoramas primarily made between 1851 and 1991—ranging in size from 28 inches to more than 17 feet.
56. OSTRIC_220412_338.JPG: MILES WEAVER. Balboa Bathing Parade. California, 1925 Photographing bathing beauties was a specialty of Miles F. Weaver, who set up a family-run studio in Los Angeles in 1916. Note how the shadows fall behind their feet on the left of the image and in front on the right. Because the subjects were standing in a semicircle while the image was captured with a swing-lens panoramic camera, the women on one side faced the sun and those on the other side had the sun on their backs. Weaver’s subjects also included early Academy Awards celebrations, religious revivals, movie publicity stills, and, during World War I, photographs of soldiers on military bases in the Southwest. IRVING UNDERHILL. View of Manhattan from Brooklyn. ca. 1913 Irving Underhill primarily photographed New York City’s architecture during the first half of the twentieth century. One specialty of his was to juxtapose older pedestrian-scaled buildings against the new skyscrapers that were beginning to dominate America’s cities. The Library of Congress has more than 500 of Underhill’s images, 26 of which are panoramas, including this image taken from the Brooklyn side of the East River looking across the Brooklyn Bridge.
57. OSTRIC_220412_350.JPG: BAIN NEWS SERVICE. Duke Kahanamoku. 1910–1915 Duke Kahanamoku helped popularize surfing, won five Olympic medals over twenty years, and acted in fourteen Hollywood movies, most famously Mister Roberts. Regarded as one of the greatest swimmers of his time, he revolutionized swimming, introducing the flutter kick that he developed in his native Hawaii. For more than twenty years, Duke served as sheriff of the City and County of Honolulu and acted as Honolulu’s unofficial greeter. In 1966, Mr. Kahanamoku taught the visiting Queen Mother Elizabeth of Great Britain how to do the hula.
58. OSTRIC_220412_359.JPG: SHARON FARMER. Beatrice Fergerson, age 97. Washington, D.C., 1990 Sharon Farmer, later appointed to a team of White House photographers for President Clinton, captured the exuberant Beatrice Fergerson, demonstrating her hula hoop prowess. “She’d hurt her hip or she would have ridden her bicycle for me,” said Farmer of the D.C. grandmother. “She was known in the neighborhood for biking and hula hooping.”
59. OSTRIC_220412_361.JPG: ACME. “King of the Turf: Seabiscuit thunders four lengths ahead of War Admiral, Pimlico Race Course.” Baltimore, Maryland, 1938 With America trying to climb out of the Great Depression, this race between two legendary horses gave people a temporary respite from their daily hardships. War Admiral, who had won racing’s Triple Crown in 1937, was the regal son of the great Man o’ War (though Seabiscuit was related as well). The aristocratic horse seemed unbeatable. Seabiscuit was the underdog, the Cinderella Man of racing. “He was the horse from the other side of the tracks who became a champion,” wrote Laura Hillenbrand in her book on Seabiscuit and the race he won.
60. OSTRIC_220412_369.JPG: DAN ESGRO. Bella Lewitzky Dance Company. California, ca. 1976 These Bella Lewitzky dancers are performing lnscape in a “duotard” designed by Rudi Gernreich, who is probably best known for his 1964 “monokini” or topless swimsuit. Gernreich was a dancer and costume designer for Lester Horton and later for the Dance Theater of Los Angeles, founded by Lewitzky and Horton in 1946.
61. OSTRIC_220412_375.JPG: CHARLES E. REED. Ray Weishaar, Winner of 100-mile race. Time: 2 hrs. 1 1/2 mins. World record. Norton, Kansas, October 22, 1914 Ray Weishaar was one of the most popular motorcycle racing stars of the 1910s and 1920s. Nicknamed the Kansas Cyclone, Weishaar commemorated his victory in the Kansas Short Grass Motorcycle Club’s one-hundred mile race with a formal studio portrait that was made into a popular postcard. He became part of the Harley-Davidson’s “Wrecking Crew” in 1916. The team’s mascot was a small pig, which they took around the track on victory laps. Because of this mascot, Harley-Davidson motorcycles are called “hogs.”
62. OSTRIC_220412_381.JPG: UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. Alexander Graham Bell and a kite he designed. Nova Scotia, 1908 Alexander Graham Bell, famous for the invention of the telephone in 1876 at the age of twenty-nine, might easily have been content with early monumental success, but his many laboratory notebooks demonstrate his genuine and rare intellectual curiosity to keep searching, striving, and wanting always to learn and to create. Bell explored the realm of communications and engaged in a great variety of scientific activities involving kites, airplanes, tetrahedral structures, sheep-breeding, artificial respiration, desalinization and water distillation, and hydrofoils.
63. OSTRIC_220412_387.JPG: JIM HANSEN. Writer Mickey Spillane and Actress Lisa Ferraday. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, 1953 Mickey Spillane wrote bestselling detective novels. His early use of media to market himself and his novels was widely influential. Spillane’s popular detective Mike Hammer was portrayed on radio, television, films, and a daily newspaper comic strip. Spillane also became a media star. He was a spokesperson for Miller Lite beer in television ads for almost two decades.
64. OSTRIC_220412_396.JPG: Arts, Sports, Leisure What do Americans do with their free time today? An obvious answer is the preoccupation with sports, as more than fifty percent of every age bracket in America occasionally watches broadcast or live-action sports. Included here are both amateur and professional athletes associated with tennis, hunting, boxing, soccer, racing (motor bikes, cars, and horses), and surfing, represented by Olympic swimming medalist Duke Kahanamoku, who popularized the sport worldwide. One of the Library’s collecting priorities includes representing those who have contributed to the nation’s cultural life. Tina Turner is captured on stage, but John Lennon is shown more intimately lying on the floor next to Yoko Ono’s hospital bed. In studios, where the photographer has more control, Jim Henson poses with early versions of the Muppets, Martha Graham dances, and child prodigy Lorin Maazel, age 9, conducts. “My idea of a great society is plenty of leisure,” postulated the great cartoonist Herbert Block, whose archive is also in the Library’s collection. Most of the “down time” photographs of ordinary citizens were made while subjects were enjoying their leisure activities, rather than posing in studios. This section features little “Davy Crocketts” seeking to recapture the Alamo, thousands of people on the beach at Coney Island, and Alexander Graham Bell’s family appreciating the unique tetrahedral kite that he designed for them.
65. OSTRIC_220412_400.JPG: MURRAY BECKER. Hindenburg Disaster. 1937 As reported in the caption of Becker’s photo for the Associated Press at the time of the accident: “The German dirigible Hindenburg crashes to earth, tail first, in flaming ruins after exploding on May 6, 1937, at the U.S. Naval Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey.” The 1920s and 1930s were the golden age of dirigibles, which crossed the Atlantic Ocean in as little as two days—faster than a ship. The Hindenburg was the largest airship ever built at 804 feet in length. It flew up to 85 miles per hour while held aloft by highly flammable hydrogen. The disaster, which killed 36 people after a 60-hour transatlantic flight, ended regular passenger service by the lighter-than-air airships.
66. OSTRIC_220412_404.JPG: JOHN FILO. Kent State, 1970 On May 4, 1970, fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio screamed over the body of twenty-year-old Kent State student Jeffrey Miller who was fatally shot by the Ohio National Guard during a protest against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Members of the Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State University demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine. The impact of the shootings was widely publicized and triggered a nationwide student strike that forced hundreds of colleges and universities to close.
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