Browse Items (1348 total)

American Pictorialist photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn was a founding member of the Photo-Secession, along with Alfred Stieglitz. Photo-Secession members advocated for photography’s status as a fine art, showing their photographs alongside…

This album of original photographs offers a view of India as seen through a Pictorialist lens. The photographer, who was a visitor to India in 1900, plays with composition and focus to soften the appearance of the photographs, differentiating this…

This album was assembled by a man named R. C. W. Lett, who is described in the album’s pages as a “colonization agent” of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. The album thus makes visible and explicit the ways that photography was used as a tool of…

Published by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1890, this brochure provides another example of the way that the CPR packaged and sold the land of Canada, and of the role that photography played in that process. Here, actual land is advertised as…

This unique album from 1894 acts as an aide memoire, with the photographs as well as the pressed plants and flowers providing an indexical link to the places represented. The gelatin dry plate process rendered photography more accessible in the…

“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…

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…

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…

Tintypes were made possible with the introduction of wet collodion. In the case of the tintype, the exposure is made on a thin sheet of metal with the result that the tones are reversed to create a positive image. Like the daguerreotype, the…

The Changing of the Guard: Graphic Incidents of the Two World Wars provides examples of photojournalism created by “official and other photographers” and collected into a commemorative album published in Australia. Some of the action shots…