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…

This album of portraits features actresses, singers, and dancers, demonstrating the growing popularity of celebrity photographs. Emerging technologies and formats such as the wet collodion process and the carte-de-visite format made mass reproduction…

This portrait of a baseball player from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, reminds us of the continued value of professional photography in the Kodak era. This portrait came with a special frame that protected the picture when it was tucked away and folded…

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…

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…

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…

“Postal Souvenirs” provides an example of what the faster exposures of the gelatin process could achieve. Here, a trip to a rodeo provided an opportunity to capture the sense of movement that eluded earlier nineteenth-century photographers. The…

This album of photographic postcards includes examples of the cyanotype process, which was a relatively simple and low-cost process frequently used for family snapshots, contact prints, and blueprints. The cyanotype process remained consistent from…

Postcards grew in popularity in the early-twentieth century. Postcards offer an easy way to send pictures through the mail, and to communicate both visually—with the picture on the front of the card—and textually, with a short message…

This report on evaporation data combines two types of photographs. Glossy silver gelatin prints that portray various locations in Alberta and Saskatchewan are inserted into cuts in the pages, while the pages themselves are cyanotypes on which the…