Wallach Division of Art Prints & Photographs

Staff of the New York Public Library recently hand picked a set of nearly 500 images, collected from across our Digital Gallery, composing them as a curated set of images at the Commons on Flickr. They represent the Hudson River Valley through several hundred years of history and complement Mapping New York's Shoreline, 1609-2009, now up in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

The images depict landscape scenes in stereoscopic vision, a popular 19th century format; everyday and commemorative menus from restaurants and catering halls; postcards of scenic places and buildings; and engravings of important estates, prominent citizens and dramatic turning points in historical events. These images have been geocoded and are part of map-based bibliography, The Storied River, coming soon to the NYPL. Stay tuned, the launch will be posted on the NYPL's map blog...

In the meantime, enjoy the same photos at the Commons on Flickr, perused as a gallery of images... Mapping New York's Shoreline: The Storied River

...or, my favorite, pinned to a map on the Flickr website.

Learn more about the NYPL Map Division.

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.

The history, plight, and societal conditions of California agricultural workers (not farmers) has been told many times over. It is not a happy story, but it is story of necessity and one that is generally forgotten as the state has been transformed into two regional metropolitan hubs. It is a nice addition, then, to find a book like Richard Steven Street’s Everyone Had Cameras. Street chronicles the photographic documentation & representation of farm workers from grape-pickers on Leland Stanford’s estate in the northern Sacramento Valley in the late 19th century to the present day migrant workers who pick strawberries in Ventura County.

A little later this year, Powerhouse Books—an independent publisher in Brooklyn—will be bringing out a volume of William T. Vollmann’s photographs of the Imperial Valley. Vollmann is well known for blending fictional and non-fictional portrayals of marginal figures in American history & society. He will follow up this photographic work with a 1300-page historical account of the Valley. Perhaps not summer reading, but it’ll get you through next winter.

Also, be sure to check out some of the NYPL's FSA images on the Flickr Commons...