Browse Items (102 total)

This album contains a collection of portraits in the format of cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards. The carte-de-visite was introduced in the 1850s by French photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri. Since Disdéri depended on the wet collodion…

The twenty-eight volumes of the Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une societé de gens de lettres(also known as the Encyclopédie) was originally published in Paris between 1751 and 1772. The edition of the…

Eadweard Muybridge’s efforts to capture animal motion with photography provides evidence of the desire to capture photographically what is invisible to the human eye. The resulting photographs had a significant influence on both scientists and…

This artists' book was created by American artist Ed Ruscha. During the 1960s and 1970s, Ruscha created a series of photographic books featuring banal subject matter such as interstate gas stations, empty swimming pools, and vacant parking lots.…

The North American Indianis a twenty-volume study of Indigenous peoples in North America, published by photographer Edward Curtis between 1907 and 1930. Bruce Peel Special Collections houses all twenty volumes, each illustrated with photogravures, as…

El Lissitzsky’s Russland: Die Rekonstruction der Architecktur in der Sowjetunion, published in 1930, proposed a new and revolutionary architecture for the Soviet Union. Like the architecture that the book promotes, the book’s photographs offered…

An association between black-and-white film and fine art photography persisted long after colour photography became commonplace among amateurs. Despite this association, Eliot Porter took up colour photography in the 1940s and achieved widespread…

Victorian bodybuilder Eugen Sandow’s guide to physical training provides an example of the ways in which photographs could be used in how-to manuals. To consider the advantages of photography for this purpose, compare this volume to The Art of…

Portraits of British Americans demonstrates some of the challenges of circulating knowledge through photographs in the mid-nineteenth century. Though these albumen prints could be mass-produced, each print had to be individually pasted onto the page…

American Pictorialist photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn was a founding member of the Photo-Secession, along with Alfred Stieglitz. Photo-Secession members advocated for photography’s status as a fine art, showing their photographs alongside…