Browse Items (102 total)

This album of photographs by Czech photographer, filmmaker, and ethnographer Karel Plicka offers a portrait of the people of Czechoslovakia in twenty pictures. The impulse to document a culture through photographs is related to other anthropological…

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.…

Lise Melhorn-Boe is a visual artist who creates unique sculptural works in the form of books. This example, titled Family Album, pairs photographs of young girls posing nicely for the camera with texts that describe what it means to be a “good…

First Over Everest: The Houston-Mount Everest Expedition 1933 brings together the technologies of aviation and photography to exert a sense of control over asublime landscape. The book’s photographic illustrations demonstrate photography’s…

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…

Published by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1890, this brochure provides another example of the way that the CPR packaged and sold the land of Canada, and of the role that photography played in that process. Here, actual land is advertised as…

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…

This souvenir book from Winnipeg provides a good example of the photogravure process.

This group portrait, printed on albumen paper, was taken inside the first Chinese church in Victoria, BC. The act of taking group portraits like this one and the sharing of the resulting prints may have contributed to the construction of collective…

Head tax certificates, as they came to be known, include photographs that attempt to fix identity in place. The text that accompanies the photographic portrait categorizes the subject as a legal immigrant, showing that the head tax required by…