Hoofs, Claws and Antlers of the Rocky Mountains by the Camera
Hoofs, Claws and Antlers of the Rocky Mountains by the Camera documents a trip through the Rocky Mountains, with an emphasis on the animals encountered (and hunted) along the way. The publication provides a good example of an early use of the halftone process, which allowed photographs to be easily printed side by side with text, bringing about what historian Gerry Beegan has called “the mass image.” In its approach to photographic illustration, this publication is firmly rooted in nineteenth-century practices. This can be seen in the photograph captioned “Mr. Wallihan and his Camera,” where Mr Wallihan stands next to a large camera mounted on an even larger tripod in order to illustrate the photographer’s care and expertise. The publisher’s note informs us of the “extreme difficulty of securing first-class negatives under these conditions,” where “the photographer was rarely able to obtain the most favorable position or sunlight advantage.” As a result, not all of the photographs published here are by Mr and Mrs Wallihan: “In order to make the collection of wild animals found in the Rocky Mountains more complete, it has been necessary to use several photographs obtained by others.” These notes, as well as an introduction entitled “How We Made the Photographs,” and a title that announces the camera’s authorship (“by the Camera”), present photography as a remarkable mode of representation that requires specialized knowledge. A full scan of this item is available through the Internet Archive.
The twenty-eight volumes of the Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une societé de gens de lettres (also known as the Encyclopédie) was originally published in Paris between 1751 and 1772. The edition of the Encyclopédie held by Bruce Peel Special Collections was published in Geneva from 1771 to 1776. As an attempt to gather together and order all of the knowledge of the world, the Encyclopédie is a representative Enlightenment project (Bull 6-9). With its eleven volumes of illustrations created by copperplate engravings, the Encyclopédie also provides an example of how illustrations could be reproduced and disseminated prior to the discovery of photography. The images and texts were printed in separate volumes since they required two different techniques for printing. One of the plates shown here portrays a print shop, and shows how such illustrations would have been created. The print has an indexical relationship with the inked plate, but unlike a photograph, it does not hold an indexical relationship to the thing that-is-seen in the illustration. Another plate, captioned "Optique," explains the principles of the camera obscura, an enclosed box that could project the view from the outside world into its interior. The earliest photographs were created by combining the camera obscura with light-sensitive materials that could fix the view as a stable image. Note in particular the two pictures at the bottom of the page; the picture on the left demonstrates the principles of the camera obscura, while the picture on the right portrays a portable camera obscura with an added lens. Camera obscuras like this one had been in use since at least the sixteenth century. Browse the Encyclopédie's articles and plates at the Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project.
Denis Diderot (author) Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (author) Pierre Mouchon (author)
University of Alberta Basketball Team Varsity I
Photograph includes: E. Anderson, S. McLennan, E. Tharp, M. Hull, W. Martin, C.E. Rac (Coach), W. McLean.
University of Alberta Archives UAA-1979-125-002
University of Alberta Archives UAA-1973-018-023
Photograph of seven co-eds who enrolled at the University of Alberta in 1908. According to Miss. Anderson they called themselves "S.I.S." or the Society of Independent Spinsters.
University of Alberta Archives UAA-1970-069-010
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 necessary to be used in that art, with advice for bathing."
Thévenot Melchisédec (author) Barth Warren Sculp (engraver)
George Baxter’s Pictorial Album; or, Cabinet of Paintings provides an example of how art reproductions circulated before the discovery of photography. Like the portraits of the Emperor and Princess of Prussia, these reproductions are made with Baxter’s chromolithography process and form part of Bruce Peel Special Collections' Cameron Collection of George Baxter Prints.
Portraits of the Emperor and Princess of Prussia
Around the same time as photography’s discovery, George Baxter developed a process of colour printing known as chromolithography, which he patented in 1835. The portraits of the Emperor and Princess of Prussia seen here employ that process in order to create richly-coloured portraits that commemorate the powerful and the wealthy. In comparison to daguerreotypes of middle-class patrons like that of Mrs Morrow, these could be, and were intended to be, circulated widely in order to promote a public identity. View Baxter's Cabinet of Paintings, another example of the chromolithographic process, as well as the Cameron Collection of George Baxter Prints, housed in Bruce Peel Special Collections.
1855 21.0 x 16.5 cm NE 1860 B2 A7 P75 1858 (Princess Royal, Princess of Prussia) NE 1860 B2 A7 V58 1855 (Vive L'Empereur!)