Browse Items (102 total)

This group portrait, printed on albumen paper, was taken inside the first Chinese church in Victoria, BC. The act of taking group portraits like this one and the sharing of the resulting prints may have contributed to the construction of collective…

This presentation album was created to commemorate a Canadian Pacific Railway investors' trip across Canada, and was published by Canadian photographic studio William Notman & Son. The album provides an example of albumen prints created using the…

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…

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…

William Gilpin’s Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty instructed readers in how to enjoy the landscapes of England’s Lake District, and was illustrated with aquatints (a type of etching) based on Gilpin's drawings. Gilpin…

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.

These views of Portree, Scotland, are reproduced by collotype, a photomechanical processdeveloped in the mid-nineteenth century that allowed photographic negatives to be printed with ink on paper. Collotypes provided a way to print photographs within…

Stereoscope technology was developed to experiment with binocular vision, and later became a popular tool for both entertainment and instruction. Stereographs seen through the stereoscope offered such a convincing illusion of three-dimensional…

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…

The Art of Swimming was published before the discovery of photography and includes engravings as a means of circulating knowledge. As explained by the subtitle, the book contains "forty proper copper-plate cuts, which represent the different postures…