Browse Items (1350 total)

Cigarette albums offer a different model for ways in which words and photographs could come together in a single volume. Albums like this one were sold with printed text and blank spaces for photographs; album owners would send in coupons that came…

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…

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…

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…

This album documents an annual inspection trip from Montreal to Victoria taken by the CPR’s chairman, president, and directors. It provides another example of the ways photography circulated knowledge about places, contributing to Canada's…

This portrait of a baseball player from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, reminds us of the continued value of professional photography in the Kodak era. This portrait came with a special frame that protected the picture when it was tucked away and folded…

This album, with its Art Nouveau cover design and faded photographs, was created during World War I. Given the presence of men in uniform on the album's pages, it is likely that the album belonged to a soldier. The album's casual snapshots suggest…