Browse Items (102 total)

This album was assembled by a man named R. C. W. Lett, who is described in the album’s pages as a “colonization agent” of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. The album thus makes visible and explicit the ways that photography was used as a tool of…

The picturesque views featured in this souvenir book, along with the subtitle "The Switzerland of America," calls attention to the ways that European perspectives and conventions influenced representations of North American landscapes.

The Art of Swimming was published before the discovery of photography and includes engravings as a means of circulating knowledge. As explained by the subtitle, the book contains "forty proper copper-plate cuts, which represent the different postures…

Celtic Ornaments from the Book of Kells provides an example of a photographic reproduction of a unique work of art. This example, published in Dublin at the end of the nineteenth century, provides access to the book's decorative elements for those…

Stereoscope technology was developed to experiment with binocular vision, and later became a popular tool for both entertainment and instruction. Stereographs seen through the stereoscope offered such a convincing illusion of three-dimensional…

These views of Portree, Scotland, are reproduced by collotype, a photomechanical processdeveloped in the mid-nineteenth century that allowed photographic negatives to be printed with ink on paper. Collotypes provided a way to print photographs within…

These "real photographs" of York are similar in format to the photographs of Melrose Abbey, though these were published by the Valentine company, a commercial photographic firm based in Scotland.

William Gilpin’s Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty instructed readers in how to enjoy the landscapes of England’s Lake District, and was illustrated with aquatints (a type of etching) based on Gilpin's drawings. Gilpin…

This portrait of two boys playing lacrosse is both a photograph and a painting, created by applying paint to a photograph. The portrait was produced by William Notman’s studio, which had artists on staff to transform photographs like this one into…

This album featuring photographs of the Canadian Rockies, Fraser River, and Yellowstone Park is a typical souvenir album that contributes to “imagined geographies” of a place, much like the album CPR 1887. The album's albumen prints, some of…