Anatomical Illustrations of the Bee

This album (labelled on the cover "Anatomische Abbildungen der Biene") from 1875 captures some of the reasons why early photography was more effective at producing knowledge than circulating knowledge. Here, photographs, drawings, and text mingle together on the page. The album’s compiler was interested in using the most effective combinations to record and convey information, and photography was not always the best choice.

Created with wet plates and printed on albumen paper, the photographs are pasted into the album and then combined with additional markings that make each page unique. Consider similarities and differences between this album and Charles Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which also used photography as a means of producing knowledge. 

One of the unique features of this album is its photomicrographs. Even though these photographs may not have circulated widely, the idea of capturing the view through the microscope photographically was considered an important breakthrough and offered advantages over the practice of recording microscopic views by hand, as seen in the example of Miscellaneous Objects as Seen With and Without the Microscope.