Most of the photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs, 20 to 200 megabytes in size) from the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) Many were digitized by LOC contractors using a Sinar studio back. They are adjusted by your webmaster for contrast and color in Photoshop before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here.

Children at play circa 1920 as captured by the pioneering news photographer and society portraitist Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870-1942). View full size. In 2000 the New York Times reviewed a retrospective of her work: "One of the reasons so few women entered the profession was that equipment was so heavy. Beals carried an 8-by-10 view camera, glass plates and a tripod, close to 50 pounds of paraphernalia. (She was further encumbered by a whalebone corset and a hat the size of a flying saucer.) Still, when a judge in a murder trial locked the photographers out, she climbed a tall bookcase up to a transom window, snapped a picture before she was detected and had a five-column front-page photograph."

August 1939. Migratory boy in squatter camp. Has come to Yakima Valley, Washington, for the third year to pick hops. Mother: "You'd be surprised what that boy can pick." View full size. Photograph by Dorothea Lange.

July 1943. Scene in a wholesale meat market shot for the Office of War Information film "Black Marketing." View full size. Photo by Roger Smith.

New York, June 1943. "Children escape the heat of the East Side by using fire hydrant as a shower bath." View full size. Photograph by Roger Smith.

July 1935. "Back street. Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania. Westmoreland County." View full size. Photograph by Walker Evans, Farm Security Administration.

May 1938. Farm boy who sells "Grit." Irwinville Farms, Georgia. View full size. 35mm nitrate negative by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration.

Spring 1942. "Girl having her tire changed in Southeast Washington." Photograph by Marjory Collins, Farm Security Administration. View full size.