Dec. 21, 1907. Our second photo of the posthumously famous Ocey Snead. (The first is here.) George Grantham Bain Collection glass negative. View full size.

August 21, 1922. "Citizens' Military Training Camp, Camp Meade" (Fort Meade, Md.). National Photo Co. View full size. Nowhere on the Internet will you find a picture of more guys simultaneously jumping off a tree than the 10 shown here.

"Mrs. Ocey Snead, in bed, baby in arms," December 1907 or January 1908. 5x7 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection. View full size. Ocey, who was found dead in an East Orange, New Jersey, bathtub in November 1909, drugged and emaciated, was at the center of scandalous murder case involving her mentally unbalanced mother and a spinster aunt who starved herself to death while awaiting trial. Along with a third sister they were thought to have conspired to drug and starve Ocey to collect $32,000 in insurance money. Ocey had two children, one of whom died in infancy. (Coverage in the New York Times noted the discovery of small bones in the furnace at a building where Ocey lived -- a Brooklyn tenement dubbed "house of mystery" and "baby farm" by the neighbors.) One part of the mystery is how two photographs of Ocey, very much alive, ended up in Bain News Service collection of glass negatives at the Library of Congress. (The other photo is dated 12-21-07). Are they are family photos obtained in the course of covering the trial of the sisters? Or is there some reason GGB would have photographed Ocey well before she died? (Cue organ music.)

New York, 1898. "Adoration," posed by May Holly and Hortense. 8x10 dry-plate glass negative by Gertrude Käsebier. View full size. Happy Mother's Day!

May 1911. Fries, Virginia. "T.J. Fields and family. Work at Washington Cotton Mills. The father cards, two girls spin, boy on right end picks up bobbins. Been working a year or two. Mother and smallest children not in photo." Photograph and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine. View full size.

Newport, Rhode Island, 1901. "The Manger. Experimental portrait showing values of white against white, featuring a young woman holding a baby." 8x10 dry-plate glass negative by Gertrude Käsebier. View full size.

December 1941. "Palm trees along the road, vicinity of Christiansted, Saint Croix, Virgin Islands." View full size. Medium format Kodachrome transparency by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration.