Browse Items (102 total)

George Baxter’s Pictorial Album; or, Cabinet of Paintings provides an example of how art reproductions circulated before the discovery of photography. Like the portraits of the Emperor and Princess of Prussia, these reproductions are made with…

Around the same time as photography’s discovery, George Baxter developed a process of colour printing known as chromolithography, which he patented in 1835. The portraits of the Emperor and Princess of Prussia seen here employ that process in order…

The title page of A System of Phrenology boasts that the volume features “upward of one hundred engravings.” Photography had been discovered by the time the book was published, but the dominant processes of the time (the daguerreotype and the…

This album (labelled on the cover "Anatomische Abbildungen der Biene") from 1875captures some of the reasons why early photography was more effective at producing knowledge than circulating knowledge. Here, photographs, drawings, and text mingle…

This carte-de-visite of Métis leader Louis Riel provides an example of how a photograph of a political figure circulates information and ideas. Riel led the Red River Resistance in 1869-70, and then negotiated the terms of Manitoba’s entry into…

Between 1860 and 1874, a team headed by Josiah D. Whitney surveyed the state of California in order to gather and circulate information about the natural resources of California.Most of the photographs in the volume featured here were taken by…

Sights and Scenes on the Tōkaidō circulates knowledge about a particular place—a popular travelling route through Japan. The photographs, reproduced as collotypes, and their accompanying texts were intended for English-speaking armchair…

The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite by British scientists James Nasmyth and James Carpenter raises questions about the role that photographs play in circulating knowledge. The book’s photographs offer a likeness of the moon,…

A selection of the souvenir books housed in Bruce Peel Special Collections.

A selection of the snapshot albums housed in Bruce Peel Special Collections.