Description: In alignment with SI's newly launched Smithsonian Open Access, Smithsonian Institution Archives has designated over 2000 items as open access!
Description: [caption id="attachment_2376" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="blurredvision, by Flickr user Paul Denton Cocker."][/caption] According to the National Eye Institute, more than 3 million Americans are blind or have vision so poor that everyday tasks become extremely difficult. Interestingly, according to a recent article by Pam Belluck in The New York Times, a new
Description: Whether you have a little downtime or you wish you remembered what downtime was like, the Archives is here for you with a few distance learning activities and organization tips.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="331" caption="14th Street and Broadway, NYC (man with goggles), 1947, by Louis Faurer, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of anonymous donors, 2007.40.61 "][/caption] Earlier this month, Google introduced the Beta and Android-based version of the new and, for some, startling photo-based search feature they’ve calling Google Goggles.
Description: While we at the Photography Initiative like to argue that photography changes everything, it’s not always the case. On June 2nd, in a controversial ninth inning call, baseball umpire Jim Joyce denied Detroit Tigers’ pitcher Armando Galarraga a shot at making history for pitching a “perfect” game. Joyce—from his point of view behind first base—saw a batter hit a ball, make it
Description: A couple of years ago, in the process of curating Now is Then, an exhibition for the Newark Museum, I spent some time researching and thinking about the content, meaning and sequential lives of snapshots. Since their introduction in the late 19th century, inestimable numbers of those small, but powerful pictures have been made, looked at and saved—at least for a while.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="251" caption="Untitled, 1890, by Thomas Smillie, Cyanotype, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Thomas Smillie Collection (Record Unit 95), Image ID: RU95_Box77_0021."][/caption] It’s inevitable. Whenever someone tries to recount or evoke photography’s impact on visual culture when Daguerreotypes were introduced in 1839, a statement
Description: Waldo L. Schmitt, a curator with the United States National Museum, participated in a 1938 expedition with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to survey the Clipperton, Cocos, and Galapagos Islands.