Browse Items (1397 total)

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…

A portrait of a young Inuit boy from Aklavik, Northwest Territories. Alex Stefansson is the son of Mrs. Stefansson and famed Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson.

Portrait of a young Inuit man, Alikomiak. He was arrested, along with fellow Inuit hunter Tatimagana, for the murder of four Inuit at Coronation Gulf in 1921. Alikomiak shot and killed an RCMP officer, W.A. Doak, and an employee of the Hudson's Bay…

Portrait of a young Inuit man, Alikomiak. He was arrested, along with fellow Inuit hunter Tatimagana, for the murder of four Inuit at Coronation Gulf in 1921. Alikomiak shot and killed an RCMP officer, W.A. Doak, and an employee of the Hudson's Bay…

Bishop Grouard, an Oblate missionary, at the Edmonton train station, June, 1922. He oversaw the vicariate of Athabasca-Mackenzie, and was active in the North for half a century. Bishop Grouard is credited with bringing the first printing press to…

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…

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…

“Postal Souvenirs” provides an example of what the faster exposures of the gelatin process could achieve. Here, a trip to a rodeo provided an opportunity to capture the sense of movement that eluded earlier nineteenth-century photographers. The…

This album of photographic postcards includes examples of the cyanotype process, which was a relatively simple and low-cost process frequently used for family snapshots, contact prints, and blueprints. The cyanotype process remained consistent from…

Postcards grew in popularity in the early-twentieth century. Postcards offer an easy way to send pictures through the mail, and to communicate both visually—with the picture on the front of the card—and textually, with a short message…