Description: Note: This blog post borrows heavily from the article, “Shooting Fireworks: Capture the Spectacle,” from former Smithsonian employee, Jim Wallace (originally published on the Smithsonian staff photographer’s website in 1995), with valuable additions from Ken Rahaim. The 4th of July is coming up next week, promising picnics, gatherings, and of course, fireworks. You may have
Description: Link Love: a weekly post with links to interesting videos and stories about archival issues, technology and culture, and Washington D.C. and American history.
Description: [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="175" caption="In this photo Reverend James O. Arthur poses on a sand dune at White Sands, New Mexico. Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Catalog number: N53381."][/caption] This is the first entry in a series celebrating National Native American Heritage Month. In this series we will be highlighting photos from the
Description: Look at enough photographs and it’s inevitable that, at some point, you’ll find yourself pondering mortality and photography’s relationship to death. Because the medium so effectively captures fragments of lives, events, and data that have come and gone, you’re always looking at and trying to make sense of something that’s over, finished, part of the past. Writers—particularly
Description: As I write this crossover Preservation Week/MayDay post so close to Earth Day 2020 (the fiftieth anniversary), stunning news continues to break across the globe due to the coronavirus. Shining through the fog of worry, there have been surprising gains in a period of forced inactivity due to reduced emissions, such as record-breaking solar energy capture in Germany, and cleaner