Articles on Photographs

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Damage and residual flooding from Mill Creek in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on Sept. 29, 2024, in Old Fort, N.C. Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images

After Hurricane Helene, survivors have been in a race against time to protect family heirlooms, photographs and keepsakes

Disaster recovery isn’t just about repairing bridges, roads and homes. Conservationists from the Smithsonian were on the ground in North Carolina helping families piece their lives back together.
While the mother’s face isn’t fully visible, the supportive arms encircling her child are. © Andrea Kaston Tange. All images are from the author’s private collection

‘Hidden mother’ photos don’t erase moms − rather, they reveal the labor and love that support the child

Mothers are smudged out and poorly cloaked beneath drapes in these 19th century portraits. But these photos are not so much relics of shoddy photography than an ode to childhood.
Lewis Wickes Hine, ‘A little spinner in a Georgia Cotton Mill, 1909.’ Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 in. The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (P545)

The US has a child labor problem – recalling an embarrassing past that Americans may think they’ve left behind

While Lewis Hine’s early-20th century photographs of working children compelled Congress to limit or ban child labor, the US Department of Labor is now under fire for failing to enforce these laws.
Jewish deportees march through the German town of Würzburg to the railroad station on April 25, 1942. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration

Unknown Holocaust photos – found in attics and archives – are helping researchers recover lost stories and providing a tool against denial

Holocaust scholars long relied on documents and survivor testimonies to help reconstruct the history of that tragic event. Now, they’re turning to wordless witnesses to learn more: pictures.
Table-tipping workshop with mediums Jane and Chris Howarth in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 2014. © Shannon Taggart. Courtesy of the Artist.

As spiritualism’s popularity grows, photographer Shannon Taggart takes viewers inside the world of séances, mediums and orbs

Alternative beliefs like spiritualism seem to experience resurgences in times of crisis. Taggart has spent the past 20 years exploring the oft-misunderstood religion.

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