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…
This album was assembled by a man named R. C. W. Lett, who is described in the album’s pages as a “colonization agent” of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. The album thus makes visible and explicit the ways that photography was used as a tool of…
This album of original photographs offers a view of India as seen through a Pictorialist lens. The photographer, who was a visitor to India in 1900, plays with composition and focus to soften the appearance of the photographs, differentiating this…
American Pictorialist photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn was a founding member of the Photo-Secession, along with Alfred Stieglitz. Photo-Secession members advocated for photography’s status as a fine art, showing their photographs alongside…
Artists Iain and Ingrid Baxter formed the NE Thing Co in 1966. The Company, which was incorporated under Canadian law, challenged the supposed divide between art and everyday life—and particularly everyday economic life—while also parodying the…
As a founding member of Group f/64, Ansel Adams—along with other members of the California-based group—used the camera’s smallest aperture (known as f/64) in order to create photographs with greater depth of field, keeping as much of the image…
Cigarette albums offer a different model for ways in which words and photographs could come together in a single volume. Albums like this one were sold with printed text and blank spaces for photographs; album owners would send in coupons that came…
Celtic Ornaments from the Book of Kells provides an example of a photographic reproduction of a unique work of art. This example, published in Dublin at the end of the nineteenth century, provides access to the book's decorative elements for those…
This cigarette album commemorates the 1936 Olympic Games, held in Berlin and in the Bavarian ski town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.Cigarette albums like this one were sold with printed text and blank spaces for photographs; album owners would send in…
Charles Darwin is recognized as one of the early adopters of photography in scientific illustration, and much has been written about his use of photographs in the 1872 publication Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.The photographs included…