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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…

William Gilpin’s Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty instructed readers in how to enjoy the landscapes of England’s Lake District, and was illustrated with aquatints (a type of etching) based on Gilpin's drawings. Gilpin…

This pamphlet for Otis dump cars provides an example of the promotional uses of photography in the early-twentieth century. It also calls to mind some of the more mundane uses of photography, which were taken up and parodied by conceptual artists in…

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…

Here we have an example of photojournalism before photojournalism was entirely practical. It would still be a few decades before thehalftone process made it efficient and therefore cost-effective to print photographs and text side-by-side. In this…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…