Browse Items (1348 total)

This artists' book was created by American artist Ed Ruscha. During the 1960s and 1970s, Ruscha created a series of photographic books featuring banal subject matter such as interstate gas stations, empty swimming pools, and vacant parking lots.…

Lantern slides, which allowed the image on a glass plate to be projected with light onto a wall or screen, represent one way that knowledge circulated through photographs. Though lantern slides with painted imagery have a long history that predates…

R. A. Ellis explains that “the scarcity of books on the subject of spider life is my excuse for assuming the role of guide into ‘Spiderland.’ The fruit of personal observation and reading is set forth, in as graphic a form as I could command,…

Victorian bodybuilder Eugen Sandow’s guide to physical training provides an example of the ways in which photographs could be used in how-to manuals. To consider the advantages of photography for this purpose, compare this volume to The Art of…

This album of photographs by Czech photographer, filmmaker, and ethnographer Karel Plicka offers a portrait of the people of Czechoslovakia in twenty pictures. The impulse to document a culture through photographs is related to other anthropological…

The Fight against Apartheid! is, as its cover explains, “an album of exhibition photographs showing life under apartheid and depicting the struggle of the South African people for their liberation under the banner of the African National…

This lavish and unique five-volume photograph album records a hunting trip to the Canadian Rockies in 1916-17. Each photograph in the album is hand-tinted with watercolours and mounted on its own page. The album's large and heavy pages provide a…

Sights and Scenes on the Tōkaidō circulates knowledge about a particular place—a popular travelling route through Japan. The photographs, reproduced as collotypes, and their accompanying texts were intended for English-speaking armchair…