Life in the Antarctic: Photographs by the Scottish Antarctic Expedition includes a prefatory note explaining that “the illustrations in this little book are all reproductions of genuine photographs from life, taken by the Leader and Staff of the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, during the voyage of the ‘Scotia,’ 1902-1904.” The note goes on to explain that the photographs “were taken under conditions of climate which make photography extremely difficult and often impossible” and “they are not touched up in any way.” Life in the Antarctic was published by Gowans & Gray as part of their series of Gowans’s Nature Books, and was intended for a general audience. A full scan of the book is available through the Internet Archive, though it is missing the colourful artwork featured on the cover of the volume held by Bruce Peel Special Collections. Reports of the scientific results of the expedition were published by the Scottish Oceanographical Laboratory in multiple volumes, some of which also included photographs.
L. H. Valette (photographer) R. N. Rudmose Brown (photographer) J. H. Harvey Pirie (photographer) R. C. Mossman (photographer)
Trial of Patrick J. Whelan for the Murder of the Hon Thos D'Arcy McGee
Here we have an example of photojournalism before photojournalism was entirely practical. It would still be a few decades before the halftone process made it efficient and therefore cost-effective to print photographs and text side-by-side. In this report of the trial of Patrick J. Whelan, there is a a single albumen print pasted onto the report. Compare this to later examples of photojournalism, such as Life and The Fight for Apartheid!. A related example from the history of photography is Alexander Gardner’s “Execution of the Conspirators” from 1865. When Gardner’s photographs of the execution were reproduced as woodcut illustrations in Harper’s Weekly on 22 July 1865, the periodical boasted that “the present perfection of the art of photography enables an illustrated paper like ours to depict persons and events with the utmost precision.” A full scan of the report is available through the Internet Archive.
This carte-de-visite of Métis leader Louis Riel provides an example of how a photograph of a political figure circulates information and ideas. Riel led the Red River Resistance in 1869-70, and then negotiated the terms of Manitoba’s entry into Confederation with the Dominion of Canada. Years later, in 1885, Riel led the Northwest Resistance in support of Métis' rights and identity, for which he was hanged. This photograph was taken at some point between those two events. As Sarah Carter and Inez Lightning have shown, Riel’s portrait circulated widely as both a carte-de-visite and as a wood engraving. In the reproductions, changes to the image allowed Riel to appear at times heroic and at other times dangerous.
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 calotype) did not offer an efficient or practical method of circulating knowledge alongside printed text. The system of phrenology described in this volume is closely related to the Victorian practice of physiognomy. Described today as pseudosciences, phrenology and physiognomy posited that an individual’s exterior features revealed aspects of their character. Later, Francis Galton would use photography as a tool to both investigate and circulate physiognomic principles, and Charles Darwin would use photographs to examine human emotion. A full scan of this item is available through the Internet Archive.
George Combe (author) J. J. Butler (engraver)
The Aurelian: A Natural History of English Moths and Butterflies
The Aurelian: A Natural History of English Moths and Butterflies was created by English entomologist and artist Moses Harris. The book’s title page explains that its pictures were “drawn, engraved and coloured from the natural subjects.” Harris’s hand-coloured engravings are remarkable, and he went on to become known as a colour theorist after publishing a treatise on colour that also features hand-coloured plates. The frontispiece (the image facing the title page) features a portrait of a man, presumably representing Harris himself, offering us a tray of specimens with his left hand while pointing into a wooded landscape with his right hand. When we follow his gesture, we see the same man engaged in the labour of collecting moths and butterflies. By selecting this image as the frontispiece, Harris seems to emphasize the presence of an expert as a guide. In contrast, photographic collections of scientific specimens often have the effect of effacing the presence of their makers. For example, compare The Aurelian to an entomological album from 1875, Anatomical Illustrations of the Bee. The copy of The Aurelian housed in Bruce Peel Special Collections and featured here is a composite of pages from the first and second editions, published in 1766 and 1778, respectively, and brought together by a previous owner. Subsequent editions were published into the nineteenth century, as can be seen from this full scan of an edition of 1840. The Aurelian forms part of the Dr Ronald B. Madge Entomology Collection.
Life is among the most famous of the twentieth-century picture magazines, and some of the century's most iconic photographs were published in its pages. This first issue of Life, from 1936, features a photograph by Margaret Bourke-White on its cover. A full scan of this issue is available through the Internet Archive. Picture magazines like Life used the halftone process, which allowed photographs to be printed efficiently alongside text. Magazines began employing photo editors to create innovative and eye-catching layouts, such as the ones seen here. To consider the changing aesthetic of photojournalism, compare Life’s photographs and layout with the illustrated news report from 1868 on the Trial of Patrick J. Whelan. The documentary photographs published in Life follow a tradition of social documentary photography that emerged in the late-nineteenth century with photographers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. Bourke-White took part in this tradition with her photographs documenting poverty in the American South, which were published alongside the writings of Erskine Caldwell in You Have Seen Their Faces. Around the same time that Bourke-White was photographing the American South, the American government’s Farm Security Administration started hiring photographers like Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks to record the effects of the Depression in America. Other examples of photojournalism included in this exhibition include The Changing of the Guard and The Fight against Apartheid!
This poster promoting Hoffman’s Novelty Circus provides an example of the halftone process used in advertising. Notice the grid pattern across the surface of the image, showing how dots were printed closer together or further apart to achieve different gradations of grey. This album is part of the Prairie Ephemera Collection housed in Bruce Peel Special Collections.
Kodachrome was one of the first widely-used colour films, introduced by the Eastman Kodak Company in 1935. Here, Kodachrome film was used to create colourful pictures of the Canadian Rockies. Printed as postcards, the pictures were sold as souvenirs of one’s travels. They could be preserved as a set, as was the case with this particular example, or sent through the mail. Many of the photographs taken with Kodachrome film were printed as slides. To see examples of Kodachrome slides, visit the Anonymous Project. Created by Lee Schuler, the website features digitized slides that “preserve this collective memory and give a second life to the people forgotten in these timeless moments captured in stunning Kodachrome film.”
This panoramic photograph was created from three different prints, as we can see from the seams between the photographs. For another example of a panoramic photographic, see the group portrait of plumbers and steamfitters. This album is part of the Prairie Ephemera Collection housed in Bruce Peel Special Collections.
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 nineteenth-century tendencies to manipulate the image—a kind of photoshop before photoshop. Though we don’t consider a belief in spirits “scientific” today, this practice holds similarities to scientific practices that have sought to capture what is invisible to the human eye photographically, such as x-ray photographs and Muybridge’s motion photographs. Of course the extent to which each of these examples is manipulated to produce an image of what was previously invisible varies. One of the most well-known nineteenth-century spirit photographers is William Mumler, who claimed to have photographed Abraham Lincoln's ghost. You will notice that Animisme et Spiritisme (Animism and Spiritualism) does not actually contain any photographs. Rather, it contains engravings based on photographs, attesting to the continued difficulties of printing photographs side by side with text in an efficient manner. Yet it is noteworthy that the texts framing the engravings insist on their photographic origins. A full scan of this item is available through the Internet Archive.
Alexandre Aksakof (author) photographer unknown