Library of Congress brings America to life in photo show

LOS ANGELES » If a picture tells a thousand words, the Library of Congress is bringing 440,000 of them to Los Angeles with a free-wheeling photo exhibition that seeks to define America’s zeitgeist in a way people have never seen.

“Not An Ostrich: And Other Images From America’s Library,” which opened Saturday at the Annenberg Space For Photography, takes visitors on a picturesque journey across the country beginning with the birth of photography and continuing to the present day.

But don’t expect just amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties, although there are a few of those included in the 440 photographs.

Instead, look for civil rights icon Rosa Parks sitting not in the back of the bus but in the front passenger seat in 1956 after the yearlong battle that she, Martin Luther King Jr. and others led to end segregation on public transportation succeeded.

See baseball immortal Babe Ruth lying in his coffin in 1948, while not far away, in a photo taken seven years later, a young Hank Aaron is seen speaking with a reporter decades before he would break Ruth’s home-run record.

Other photos show how day-to-day American life has evolved from the 19th century, when horse-drawn wagons hauled ice to homes, to 2005 when thousands lined up outside a Mojave Desert airplane hangar to see the launch of the X-Box 360 game.

“I’ll be disappointed if somebody can come into this space and not find at least one picture that they love,” exhibition curator Anne Wilkes Tucker said during a recent pre-opening tour.

Tucker worked for nearly two years with Library of Congress photo curator Beverly Brannan and others, culling through an estimated 1 million of the library’s 14 million photos.

Some of the selections are laughout-loud funny as in a man holding a sign on a frigid Wisconsin winter day in 2001 asking, “What? You Couldn’t Have Pulled This Crap In Warm