These amazing photographs are from
this Smithsonian Institution flickr set. Thomas Smillie was the Smithsonian's first photographer.
These photos are his documentations of Smithsonian life, cataloging much of the institution's physical collections and museum installations. Smillie used blue cyanotypes to keep track of the glass-plate negatives his staff made, in part because the medium presented a quick and inexpensive way to create photographic prints. The bulky glass negatives were numbered and filed.
