As promised, today on Monday Mysteries we take a look at a photo I ran across at the Library of Congress last month that has raised some questions in my mind for future exploration.

I happened to notice the following intriguing notation in the LOC catalog for a photo called “Portrait of a Ship Caption”, c1897, taken by a photographer just called “Miss Libby”:

[written on back of print] Print from 11×14 plate; flash-light, using electric fan to get the effect of wind blown whiskers.

Electric fan? Flash-light? Used to get a special effect? In 1897?! Cool! The photo had not been digitized, so I asked the LOC guy to pull it from the stacks so I could have a look at it. Here are a couple of photos I took of it (through the plastic protective sleeve that I wasn’t allowed to take off):

 

What a fantastic photo! In person it was remarkable for its clarity and detail – including those wind-blown whiskers.

Of course, this made me want to find more photos by “Miss Libby”, but there was only one other one in the catalog. Oddly enough, it had already been digitized:

Nice, but not like the remarkable photo of that ship captain.

Unlike entries for some other early 20th century women photographers, a quick scan of the catalog didn’t reveal any additional information about “Miss Libby”.  Her photos are included in a set of photos collected by another female photographer,  Frances Benjamin Johnston, most of which were included in an exhibition Johnston organized at the 1900 Paris Exposition. However, “Miss Libby” is not included in the book I have about that exposition — a book, I should note, co-written by a curator at the LOC in the past decade.

Curiouser and curiouser, eh?. I definitely need to track down more information about Miss Libby one of these days — one of the apparently overlooked great female photographers from c1900. 🙂