smithsonian

The National Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution, has purchased a daguerreotype of Dolley Madison for $456,000 -- the early known photograph of a First Lady.

The Smithsonian's collection of historical artifacts is so large that only 1% of its 150 million piece collection is showcased at any given time. Mixed with age and fragility, the museum is quickly virtualizing its collection to be viewed online.

Smithsonian.com has just announced the winning photos of its 2017 photo contest, the 15th edition of the contest. The grand prize winner this year was photographer Thong Huu for his photo above, titled "Breakfast at the Weekly Market."

Copyright infringement isn't just perpetrated by evil corporations and people knowingly breaking the law, laughing as they do. Even the Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery messes up once in a while, as photographer Lynn Goldsmith is pointing out.

Inside the bowels of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC you'll find something amazing. Classified, labelled, and impeccably organized, you'll find 90% of the Smithsonian's collections tucked neatly away in drawers and cabinets. Well... usually they're tucked away.

On a May evening in 2005, a group of us were spending time in my parents’ garage. We’d just graduated from high school days earlier and didn’t know what to do with ourselves. One of many boring nights spent pissing the time away, high on the excitement of graduation and fear of the future; I’m quite sure I’d have forgotten all about that night if it wasn’t for the noise we heard in the driveway.

While cover a fast food workers strike at the National Air and Space Museum last week, photographer Kristoffer Tripplaar was forcefully brought down by no less than three security guards when he accidentally bumped into one of them in an attempt to protect his equipment.

Working in concert with publisher Xavier Barral and writer/scientist Dr. Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu, photographer Patrick Gries has put together a book/photo series packed full of striking black and white photographs of vertebrate skeletons -- from tiny creatures to massive elephants, his book Evolution covers a vast swath of vertebrate natural history.

Colonel George Everette "Bud" Day is a retired U.S. Air Force Command Pilot who served his country during the Vietnam war, enduring a stint as a POW and earning the Medal of Honor and the Air Force Cross.

When he was asked to be on the cover of Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine, it was portrait photographer Robert Seale who got the honor of photographing him, and for our sakes, he put together a behind-the-scenes video while he was at it.