Browse Items (102 total)

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…

The title page of A System of Phrenology boasts that the volume features “upward of one hundred engravings.” Photography had been discovered by the time the book was published, but the dominant processes of the time (the daguerreotype and the…

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…

This album includes photographs of medical students at the University of Alberta in the 1920s. One page of the album shown here features two photographs taken in the university's Anatomy Laboratory, where men in white lab coats appear to be having…

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…

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…

These "real photographs" of York are similar in format to the photographs of Melrose Abbey, though these were published by the Valentine company, a commercial photographic firm based in Scotland.

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…

The practice known as spirit photography pushes the limits of what we consider photographic by seeking to represent the spiritual, rather than the physical and visible, on the photographic plate. The practice of spirit photography also points towards…

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…