libraryofcongress

The Library of Congress has released a fantastic series of historical photos that show faces in unexpected places.

The Library of Congress has gleefully released this "freshly digitized" 1936 photo of a cat dressed as the Valkyrie Brünnhilde from the opera Der Ring des Nibelungen as free to use.

SmugMug and Flickr (which was acquired by SmugMug in 2018) have announced a new nonprofit organization called the Flickr Foundation, whose mission is to help keep "billions of historic and culturally significant photographs safe, sound, and accessible for future generations."

The Library of Congress is asking for the public's help in identifying the people in a collection of mystery images.

The photo above is of a woman named Shizuko Ina, but for nearly 80 years she remained unidentified until the staff at the Library of Congress were able to connect with her daughter and grandson.

The Library of Congress has created something really cool. It's called the Newspaper Navigator, and it's an AI-powered image search that lets you browse through over 1.5 million newspaper photos from over 16 million pages worth of digitized newspapers published between 1900 and 1963.

The Library of Congress has invited all Flickr users in the United States to submit photos of "their experiences living through the 2020 coronavirus pandemic." The best images will be added to a special online photo pool and some will be preserved in the LOC's permanent collections.

Late last week, controversial free stock photography website Unsplash announced that the Library of Congress, CDC, the New York Public Library and 10 other major institutions would be adding hundreds of scientific and historic images from their collection to the site's archive.

Taken in September of 1942, this captivating collection of black and white photographs show the New York Times in production during the height of World War II.

The Library of Congress recently acquired the archives of civil rights photographer Bob Adelman. An anonymous donor gifted the collection, an archive that contains some of the most outstanding images ever captured of the Civil Rights Movement.

Ansel Adams is best known for his breathtaking landscape photos, but he photographed much more than nature during his decades-long career. In 1943, already the best-known American photographer, Adams visited the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California, one of the relocation camps the US gathered Japanese-Americans into during World War II.

If you come across any photograph published in the US before 1923, you're free to use it for whatever purpose you'd like, with or without permission, and with or without attribution. Why? Because its copyright has expired and it's public domain.

Strangely enough, sometimes free public domain photos get sold as stock photos, and those who don't know any better may pay large sums to use something they could have used for free.

A 87-year-old grandmother in Texas has sold a rare and valuable collection of more than 500 Civil War-era photographs to the Library of Congress after building her personal collection for four decades.

It's hard to imagine it, but in the early 1900s, child labor was still extremely common in the United States. All across the nation children would spend their days slaving away in mines and cotton mills, far away from the school rooms that the National Child Labor Committee wanted them to be in.

The NCLC had been trying to put a stop to child labor since it was founded in 1904, but statistics weren't having the effect they had hoped. So, in 1908, they decided to enlist the help of Lewis Hine and his camera to get their message out.

Last month, the Library of Congress finally finished a project they started all the way back in 2008: they finished digitizing an archive of 467 panoramic postcards from the early 1900's. All of these postcards are now available online for interested folks to peruse through, learn from and enjoy.

One of the big trends in the camera industry these days is the stuffing of "big camera" sensors into "small camera" bodies. After all, if you can get the same image quality from a camera that's smaller in size, why wouldn't you want to? (That's the idea, at least).

The quality and portability of cameras these days would be quite astonishing to photographers from back in the earlier days of photography -- the days in which you needed both hands and a strong back to work as a photojournalist. In this post, we've compiled photos from those "good ol' days" to see how far photography has come.

When you think about photographs from the early 1900s, you probably think about boring monochrome photos of locations or portraits of people with humorless expressions and rigid poses. Photographs costed more in terms of time, effort, and money back then, so photographers didn't waste them on silly photos, right? Wrong.

This series of photographs was created around 1905 by an unknown artist. Titled Bulldogs in Fancy Dress, it's being preserved for eternal chuckles in the Library of Congress' photo archives.

Facebook is by far the world’s largest photo service, but how does its massive image collection compare with other …