Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="320" caption="Untitled, by Thomas Smillie, c. 1890, Smithsonian Institution Archives."][/caption] One of the things people often want to know about photography at the Smithsonian is, “How many photographs do you have?” with the quick follow-up, “Have you counted all of them?” No one knows for certain, but statistical sampling suggests
Description: To mark American Indian Heritage Month this year, staff members from the Photo Archive at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), filled us in on the history of the collections recently made available on the NMAI Collections Search website. As a follow-up, they are sharing their personal favorites from the archive. Today we hear from Emily Moazami,
Description: In November 1938, Science News Letter published a story on Enrico Fermi winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, running a headshot of the professor. It's the kind of photo found in a passport—Fermi is looking forward with not much of a smile. The next question a historian would ask is did Science Service, the publisher, hire one of its photographers to take the photo, or acquire
Description: [caption id="attachment_10342" align="alignleft" width="228" caption="Miss Willey Glover DeNis, (1879-1929), Smithsonian Institution Archives, SIA2008-0987."][/caption] At the Archives, we often run across images that have minimal information associated with them. Sometimes it’s a number or a name (usually incomplete) or a year. It is rare to find a beautifully complete
Description: A station for the Metro, Washington DC’s subway system, was eliminated from early plans but protest by the Smithsonian ensured it would be built.
Description: We've just added a final batch of photographs to our "Science Service" set on the Flickr Commons in honor of Women's History Month, and there are some interesting new ladies there. You might assume that since the images are from Science Service, they would only feature scientists. However, Science Service, a news service designed to popularize science and to disseminate