“Plastic flowers festoon Mt. Carmel Cemetery in El Paso, Texas,” February 2014, by Carol M. Highsmith, via The Lyda Hill Texas Collection of Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Tag: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
The winter garden: San Francisco
The dome of the Conservatory of Flowers, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California, 1981, by Jet Lowe for an Historic American Buildings Survey, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The Conservatory is the oldest public wood-and-glass conservatory in North America, opening to the public in 1879.
The Sunday porch: Independence Ave.
Upper porch of a house being torn down on Independence Avenue, S.W., Washington, D.C., June 1942, by Gordon Parks for the Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
This picture is one of a series taken by Parks documenting the “demolition of private property along Independence Avenue opposite the Smithsonian Institution. . . to make way for government housing.”
Today the location is filled by some particularly unappealing government office buildings, built during the 1960s.
Up — or out? — here:
a problem of preposition,my uneasy relation
with the world. Whether I’mabove it or apart. . . .
— Jameson Fitzpatrick, from “Balcony Scene“
The Sunday porch: pots and pans
“Girl seated at the end of a porch,” ca. 1930, by Doris Ulmann, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
A well-to-do New Yorker, Doris Ulmann trained as an art photographer with Clarence H. White in the 1910s. In the 1920s, she began traveling to the southeastern United States to photograph rural people, particularly in the hills of Kentucky and the Sea Islands of South Carolina — people “for whom life had not been a dance.” She also documented Appalachian folk arts and crafts, working with musician and folklorist John Jacob Niles.
The Sunday porch: South Dakota
Pierre, South Dakota, 1940, by John Vachon, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.— Christina Rossetti, from “In the bleak midwinter“
enclos*ure 