Browse Items (102 total)

These photographs of Palmyra, Syria, are printed as glossy silver gelatin prints and were likely taken with a hand-held camera and celluloid film. Despite this use of twentieth-century technologies, the photographs follow a tradition of travel…

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

This portrait of Mrs Morrow provides an example of one of the first successful photographic technologies: the daguerreotype. The daguerreotype processcreated a single positive image on a metal plate—meaning that there was no negative and no…

This album, with its Art Nouveau cover design and faded photographs, was created during World War I. Given the presence of men in uniform on the album's pages, it is likely that the album belonged to a soldier. The album's casual snapshots suggest…

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 album documents an annual inspection trip from Montreal to Victoria taken by the CPR’s chairman, president, and directors. It provides another example of the ways photography circulated knowledge about places, contributing to Canada's…

Tintypes were made possible with the introduction of wet collodion. In the case of the tintype, the exposure is made on a thin sheet of metal with the result that the tones are reversed to create a positive image. Like the daguerreotype, 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…

“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 unique album from 1894 acts as an aide memoire, with the photographs as well as the pressed plants and flowers providing an indexical link to the places represented. The gelatin dry plate process rendered photography more accessible in the…