Browse Items (1400 total)

As a founding member of Group f/64, Ansel Adams—along with other members of the California-based group—used the camera’s smallest aperture (known as f/64) in order to create photographs with greater depth of field, keeping as much of the image…

Artists Iain and Ingrid Baxter formed the NE Thing Co in 1966. The Company, which was incorporated under Canadian law, challenged the supposed divide between art and everyday life—and particularly everyday economic life—while also parodying the…

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…