tural views and outdoor scenes are found also. In
1926, the Library acquired its first ‘‘master’’ fine-art
photographs: two important groups of works from
the estate of influential pictorialist Clarence H.
White and from his fellow Photo-Secessionist, Ger-
trude Ka ̈sebier. Although the Library had by this
time amassed substantial holdings of documentary
photographs, these acquisitions marked its recogni-
tion of the artistic value of the medium and its inten-
tion to develop collections of aesthetic significance
in tandem with those of documentary importance.
In the 1930s, photographs by F. Holland Day and
Clarence H. White were received from the Alfred
Stieglitz estate. For many years the Stieglitz photo-
graphs were kept in the rare book room, but eventually
curator Jerald Maddox consolidated the photographs
into the Prints and Photographs Division.
In the 1930s, the Carnegie Corporation provided
funds to establish and support at the Library a
national repository for photographic negatives of
early American architecture, now called the Pictor-
ial Archives of Early American Architecture. This
development had been encouraged by the deposit
at the Library in 1929 of several thousand photo-
graphic negatives of gardens and architectural sub-
jects by an important architectural photographer
(among her other specialties), Frances Benjamin
Johnston. This deposit was followed by many
others in later years. Supported by grants from
the Carnegie Corporation, Johnston was commis-
sioned by the Library to create an archive of her
fine photographic records of the rapidly disappear-
ing Southern antebellum architecture, with special
devotion to its humbler buildings. Johnston’s
donation of a body of work set an important pre-
cedent for donations of architectural photographs
by photographers and their families and sponsors,
among them Gertrude Wittemann, Theodor Hor-
ydczak, Carol M. Highsmith, and Joseph E. Sea-
gram and Sons.
In 1943, Librarian of Congress Archibald
MacLeish announced the purchase of the photo-
graphic prints and glass negatives by Arnold Gen-
the (1869–1942) remaining in his studio at the time
of his death. This collection of approximately
10,000 negatives, 8,700 contact prints and enlarge-
ments, plus transparencies and color work, is the
largest assemblage of Genthe’s work anywhere. At
about the same time MacLeish established a com-
mittee ‘‘to insure the proper development’’ of the
Library’s photographic archive.
Genthe was an internationally recognized photo-
grapher working in the soft-focus pictorialist style.
The Library’s ‘‘electronic collection’’ contains ap-
proximately 16,000 of Genthe’s black-and-white
negatives, transparencies, lantern slides, and color
Autochromes. Its production was part of an initia-
tive by Congress to help the Library to preserve
fragile negative collections. Most of Genthe’s prints
were unprocessed by the end of the century, how-
ever, and access to them requires written permission
from the Chief, Prints and Photographs Division.
The Library’s Prints and Photographs Division
has long been almost synonymous with documen-
tary photographs from the era of the Great Depres-
sion. In 1940, the Library of Congress Works
Projects Administration (WPA) Project began col-
lecting materials produced by the federal art,
music, theater, and writers’ projects and the His-
torical Records Survey. In collecting materials
from these government-initiated projects, the line
between the missions of the Library and the
National Archives was blurred, since the National
Archives would normally (and more logically) col-
lect original materials produced or commissioned
by the federal government.
In 1944, the Library took custody of the Office of
War Information collection of nearly 300,000
photographs, including the ‘‘photo-documentation
of America’’ file organized by Roy E. Stryker in the
Farm Security Administration from 1936 to 1942.
The combined photographic archives of two land-
mark photographic documentation projects carried
out successively within two federal agencies, the
Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Office
of War Information (OWI), were placed by execu-
tive order under the administration of the Library.
The FSA-OWI archive was the most comprehensive
photographic survey of the lives of ordinary people
ever assembled. To the Library’s already extensive
pictorial coverage of American buildings, cities, and
news events it added an unequaled record of a
broad spectrum of Americans living and coping
with the difficult period of 1935–1943. The famed
photographers, who worked on the basis of field
assignments from Stryker, included Walker Evans,
Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein,
Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Esther Bubley, Gordon
Parks, Marion Post Wolcott, Carl Mydans, and
John Vachon. As the scope of the project broadened,
the photographers began documenting both rural
and urban areas, then turned to Americans’ mobili-
zation for war. The total collection, including photo-
graphs from outside sources—military, industrial,
and news bureaus, contains about 164,000 black-
and-white film negatives and transparencies, 1,610
color transparencies, and 107,000 black-and-white
photographic prints.LIBRARY OF CONGRESS