Browse Items (34 total)

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…

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 of portraits features actresses, singers, and dancers, demonstrating the growing popularity of celebrity photographs. Emerging technologies and formats such as the wet collodion process and the carte-de-visite format made mass reproduction…

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 portrait of Mrs Morrow provides an example of one of the first successful photographic technologies: the daguerreotype. The daguerreotype processcreated a single positive image on a metal plate—meaning that there was no negative and no…

This group portrait, printed on albumen paper, was taken inside the first Chinese church in Victoria, BC. The act of taking group portraits like this one and the sharing of the resulting prints may have contributed to the construction of collective…

Head tax certificates, as they came to be known, include photographs that attempt to fix identity in place. The text that accompanies the photographic portrait categorizes the subject as a legal immigrant, showing that the head tax required by…

This group portrait of a graduating class in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, brings together 49 individual portraits, mostly sharing the same oval shape and similar poses, facing forward or turned slightly to the side. The similarities between them, and…

This group portrait of plumbers and steamfitters was taken during a picnic held at Shouldice Park in Calgary in July of 1926. The portrait was printed as one single print, in contrast to some panoramic photographs that were created by putting…

This album contains a collection of portraits in the format of cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards. The carte-de-visite was introduced in the 1850s by French photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri. Since Disdéri depended on the wet collodion…