Posts from the Photography Collection

Most New Yorkers, when asked to name NYC landmarks, will conjure up the familiar array of iconographic symbols that make up our city: the Statue Liberty, the Empire State Building, Times Square, the Ground Zero Memorial, etc. — but having grown up in Washington Heights, I can’t help but place the George Washington Bridge among the great monuments of Gotham pride. Ever since its completion in 1931, this stunning suspension bridge has remained a sight that never gets old, one which seems so in harmony with its surroundings, and whose effortless beauty belies a remarkable feat of engineering.

Recent Acquisitions: Prints and Photographs is on view in the Print and Stokes Galleries at The New York Public Library's Stephen A Schwarzman Building through June 30, 2011.

Presented in honor of the 100th birthday of NYPL's landmark building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, Recent Acquisitions: Prints and Photographs features an exceptional collection of print and photographic works by contemporary artists acquired by the Library within the last decade.

Thursday, May 19, 2011
6 to 8 p.m.
Vanderbilt Hall, Grand Central Terminal
Free and Open to the Public

You're invited! Join Jay Walder, Chairman, Metropolitan Transportation Authority; Paul LeClerc, President, The New York Public Library; and Kathryn Court, President and Publisher, Penguin Books; for a special book launch for Know the Past, Find the Future: The New York Public Library at 100, NYPL’s free Centennial book.

Today we most often encounter a photograph as a digital image — its only physical presence is the screen from which it shines: a television, computer, or mobile device. Disembodied, the digital image can exist in infinite places at once, with no physical characteristics of its own.

On Sunday, December 5, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building was the site of the 2010 Holiday Open House, the Library's annual thank-you celebration for donors at the Friends level ($40) or above. Besides enjoying building-wide party fun, attendees were offered a rare opportunity to glimpse a part of the Library that is normally hidden from public view: the building's central stacks that lie beneath the Rose Main Reading Room. As a "tour guide" on one of the 18 enormously popular stack tours, I thought it would be fun to share my "patter" with a wider audience.

The NYPL Photography Collection has one of the largest collections of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs outside of the Library of Congress. I’m not sure what it is about these images—though given the economic times I’d say they are due for a resurgence—but they continue be some of the most popular and to present some of the most iconic images in American history: Dorothea Lange’s photographs of Okies newly arrived to their hardscrabble yet hopeful life in the interior valleys of California being perhaps the most prominent example.