Browse Items (102 total)

This series of postcards from the collection of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague provides a striking example of the transition from Pictorialism towards straight photography among twentieth-century photographers. The postcards were issued in…

These reprints of John Heartfield’s photomontages show one way that photographs circulated political knowledge. Heartfield reused and remixed images printed in the German mainstream media in order to expose and critique Nazi propaganda. One example…

Literary scholar Stephanie L. Hawkins explains that, “as one of the world’s most widely recognized distributors of global images, National Geographic has filled an important role in what Arjun Appadurai has termed the global mediascape” by…

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…

Life in the Antarctic: Photographs by the Scottish Antarctic Expedition includes a prefatory note explaining that “the illustrations in this little book are all reproductions of genuine photographs from life, taken by the Leader and Staff of the…

All but one of the photographs in this souvenir book were taken by Leonard Frank, one of Vancouver's leading photographers in the early-twentieth century. Frank's photograph of the newly-constructed Burrard Bridge is particularly noteworthy: Frank…

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…

Life is among the most famous of the twentieth-century picture magazines, and some of the century's most iconic photographs were published in its pages. This first issue of Life, from 1936, features a photograph by Margaret Bourke-White on its cover.…

Lantern slides, which allowed the image on a glass plate to be projected with light onto a wall or screen, represent one way that knowledge circulated through photographs. Though lantern slides with painted imagery have a long history that predates…

The Aurelian: A Natural History of English Moths and Butterflies was created by English entomologist and artist Moses Harris. The book’s title page explains that its pictures were “drawn, engraved and coloured from the natural…