Curator of our nation’s photographic history

When Beverly Brannan was 3 years old, a neighbor gave her a little pair of red plastic scissors as a gift when her little brother was born. She played with them constantly, cutting pictures out of magazines and catalogs. This was the beginning of a lifelong love of images that eventually led Brannan to her dream job as curator of photography for the Library of Congress.

After graduating from college with a degree in history and a minor in art history, Brannan “went the rounds of receptionist jobs,” hated them all and called one of her teachers to find out how she could get a job at the Library of Congress. She had done some research there for a school paper and recalled the sheer joy of being surrounded by “the real stuff.” Brannan filled out an application and snagged an interview in the Prints and Photographs Division, where they showed her photographs and asked her to describe what she’d tell someone who had ordered a copy of the picture.

“I was in heaven,” Brannan says. “I was looking for electric lines, for cars on the street. If it was a harbor scene, I’d try to figure out what was on those ships, what they were carrying. I thought this was the most wonderful job in the world, but I got a job in the Manuscript Division instead.”

Though she enjoyed her four years working with manuscripts, Brannan says she was ready for a change when the library acquired Look magazine’s collection of 5 million items as well as the archives of New York photographer Toni Frissell that included 300,000 rolls of film. Help was needed, so Brannan applied and finally landed the coveted job in Prints and Photographs. It was 1974, and she’s been there ever since.

For her first few years on the job, Brannan pored over the two new collections, often meeting with the photographers to hear stories that made the pictures come alive.

She then moved on to smaller collections, including photographs from the Alexander Graham Bell family. And in 1978, while working on her master’s degree in American studies, she selected the Farm Security Administration (FSA) collection from the New Deal program of 1935-1942 as the focus for her thesis.

“This was back when we didn’t have television, and a lot of people didn’t even have radio. Lots of folks thought that drought conditions were being exaggerated. So photographers were sent out to places where the federal government was helping people to cope and survive,” Brannan says.

The FSA photographers not only captured on film what was happening, they also wrote letters to the home office to describe their progress. Brannan was able to read the letters as she worked on the photos. Focusing on her home state of Kentucky, she would follow the photographers’ routes on a map from the 1930s. When one photographer’s captions didn’t match up with the road signs in her photographs, Brannan tracked her down to ask about them. The photographer, Marion Post Wolcott, was by then a recluse living in Santa Barbara, Calif.

“She was in poor health and didn’t want anybody to bother her, but I was persistent. I had to see her. I flew out, rented a car and drove to her house. She opened the door and we just fell into each other’s arms, like we were long-lost friends. We had a wonderful visit,” Brannan says. “I asked her about these captions, she put her hands over her face and said, ‘Did I do it wrong? I was traveling by myself, the roads weren’t marked very well, and we had to get from one place to another to make pictures. A lot of times I didn’t write the captions until I got back to Washington!’”

These and many other images by FSA photographers made their way into Brannan’s first book, A Kentucky Album: Farm Security Administration Photos, 1935-1942, published by the University Press of Kentucky in 1986. Some were also included in her second book, Documenting America, which was published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the FSA and New Deal programs.

Over the years, Brannan has also worked on projects including “Eyes of the Nation,” a visual history of the U.S., and “Women Come to the Front,” about female journalists who covered World War II.

She is also excited about several new acquisitions including color photographs of outsider art in Mississippi and photos documenting the effects of methamphetamine on a family in Oklahoma.

She encourages people to check out the Library of Congress website at [www.loc.gov/rr/print/] to view some of the more than 1 million images that are available there. “This saves a trip to Washington, saves wear and tear on handling the original photographs, and people have actually made discoveries because they can look at so many images quickly,” she says.

—Sharon Huss Roat AS ’87

Brannan and husband John Vlach, a professor of American studies at George Washington University, are the parents of Molly, a UD sophomore, who is studying sports and fitness.