Browse Items (102 total)

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 album featuring photographs of the Canadian Rockies, Fraser River, and Yellowstone Park is a typical souvenir album that contributes to “imagined geographies” of a place, much like the album CPR 1887. The album's albumen prints, some of…

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…

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…

El Lissitzsky’s Russland: Die Rekonstruction der Architecktur in der Sowjetunion, published in 1930, proposed a new and revolutionary architecture for the Soviet Union. Like the architecture that the book promotes, the book’s photographs offered…

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…

Eadweard Muybridge’s efforts to capture animal motion with photography provides evidence of the desire to capture photographically what is invisible to the human eye. The resulting photographs had a significant influence on both scientists and…

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…

The North American Indianis a twenty-volume study of Indigenous peoples in North America, published by photographer Edward Curtis between 1907 and 1930. Bruce Peel Special Collections houses all twenty volumes, each illustrated with photogravures, as…

This album (labelled on the cover "Anatomische Abbildungen der Biene") from 1875captures some of the reasons why early photography was more effective at producing knowledge than circulating knowledge. Here, photographs, drawings, and text mingle…