This summer, Michelle Smiley served as a graduate student intern at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where she worked in the department of photography under curator Diane Waggoner. Michelle spent much of her time doing research for an upcoming exhibit of nineteenth-century photography on the east coast of the United States, titled “East of the Mississippi” (forthcoming, fall 2016). In particular, she researched individual photographers like William Herman Rau, a photographer for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Henry Peter Bosse, a German-American photographer who served in the United States Corps of Engineers out of Rock Island, Illinois. Bosse photographed the development of the Mississppi in the 1880s and 1890s.

Above, Michelle can be seen cataloguing one of the twenty Bosse cyanotypes given to the National Gallery of Art. These are all part of the series “Views on the Mississippi River” which were displayed as an album at the 1893-94 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.

The prestigious internship program at the National Gallery of Art also includes bi-weekly seminars that introduce the interns to all aspects of museum work, from library image collections, to curatorial, to the director’s office.