Posts from the Photography Collection

In this episode, NYPL's Zulay Chang and photography scholar Dr. Tal-Or Ben-Choreen explored Mike Mandel’s 1975 series Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards and the way it provides insight into the networking that occurred between photographers, curators, and critics during the 1970s.

In this episode, NYPL's Elizabeth Cronin spoke with writer Lydia Pyne about her book 'Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Social Network'. They discussed how these personal connections can be traced within the Library's beloved Picture Collection.

Lyudmila Sholokhova and Vladimir Levin discussed the photographer's role in documenting these institutions from their heyday to their decline in the 1960s and 1970s, when many were repurposed or demolished.

In this episode Julie Golia and Kim Phillips-Fein explored a collection of evocative photographs of the New York City subway system in the 1970s by Alen MacWeeney, discussing what the images reveal about the city during a decade of crisis and transformation.

In this episode Bogdan Horbal of NYPL and Smoki Musaraj of Ohio University, discussed photographer Lewis Wickes Hine's celebration of ethnic and cultural diversity as a manifesto against rising prejudice and discrimination against specific groups of immigrants.

In this episode, Doc Chat paid homage to a remarkable Inuit performer and considered how she appealed to and defied stereotypes as an Indigenous woman in modern American society.

List of free online resources to help you delve into the many aspects of Latinx & Hispanic history and culture, all free with a library card.

In this episode, NYPL’s Ian Fowler and Elizabeth Cronin revealed the cultural and technological origins of aerial photography, analyzed several examples, and provided historical context for its use in exploration, the military, mapmaking, and more.

In this episode, NYPL's Zulay Chang and public historian Richard Cheu analyzed several 19th-century photographs related to the construction and completion of the transcontinental railroad.

In this episode, NYPL's Joshua Chuang and renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers, author of the recently published Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch, will discuss how the great American artist came to develop his eye, as well as the influential encounters Evans had as a young artist at the NYPL.

On the most recent episode of Doc Chat we explored the intersection of gender and modernism in early 20th-century photography. NYPL's Elizabeth Cronin and Andrea Nelson of the National Gallery of Art discussed the little known histories of two female photographers: Thérèse Bonney and Elizabeth Buehrmann.

Readers joined us for this discussion on Zoom from Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx; upstate in New Paltz; a patio in Santa Fe; a campground in California; a living room in Hawaii; and from more distant time zones of Sicily and Mumbai.

Including genealogy, the performing arts, LGBT studies and more.

Understanding that they, as young people, are historical actors and that their lives are worthy of scholarly analysis can be a profoundly empowering experience.

Our Digital Collections are rich with subway material including a collection of photographs by Alen MacWeeney that capture the quirkiness, diversity, and grittiness of late 1970s New York.

From painstaking hand-drawn illustrations to actually adding dried plant specimens to works, bringing botanical studies to life had been challenging for centuries. Discover the different processes, and how they led to Anna Atkins's groundbreaking work, "Photographs of British Algae."

See what it's like to "dar un paseo" (take a leisurely stroll) down one of the most famous avenues in Havana.

This season, The New York Public Library is drawing from its collections—and ideas that continue to inspire artists today—to present two companion exhibitions celebrating the life and legacy of one of photography’s earliest pioneers.

With a Super Blue Blood Moon appearing in the sky on January 31, we look back at an innovative astrophotographer who produced stunning moon photos in 1865.