From creepy Victorian post-mortem portraits to Félix Nadar’s horrifying shot of the Paris Catacombs, we’re definitely never sleeping again.
early photography
Posted inArt
The Very First Photograph of a US Presidential Inauguration
The image dates from the 1850s, when the recent discovery of the wet-plate collodion process allowed for crisp captures of landmark moments to be faithfully documented and easily disseminated.
Posted inArt
Pompeii Before the Point-and-Shoot: The Earliest Photographs of Italy
The first photographic images seen in Italy were botanical prints by Henry Fox Talbot, beginning three decades of experimentation with photography in 19th-century Italy.
Posted inArt
Overlooked 19th-Century Landscape Photos from East of the Mississippi
An exhibition at the National Gallery of Art highlights the environmental and artistic influence of 19th-century landscape photography in the eastern United States.
Posted inNews
An Online Catalogue for All 25,000 of William Henry Fox Talbot’s Photographs
The Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford launched the first complete, digital catalogue for 19th-century photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot.
Posted inArt
The First Photographs of Lightning Crackle with Electric Chaos
In the 1880s, William Nicholson Jennings set out to prove the diversity and unpredictability of lightning’s path, capturing the electric light with his plate camera.
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19th-Century Storm Chasers Took the First Tornado Photographs
In the 19th century, when photography was developing into a mass medium, a few intrepid early adopters pointed their glass plate cameras at one of the most intimidating natural forces on Earth: the tornado.
Posted inArt
The First Woman Photographer Captured the Elegance of Algae
Algae is graceful and light in the ocean, swaying with the waves like hair in the wind.
Posted inArt
Hand-tinted Photos of Geishas and Idyllic Landscapes in Early Modern Japan
Japan’s Meiji period (1868–1912) is commonly described as a time of quick economic and political modernization and self-conscious competition with Western military might and colonial aspirations.
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A Tale of Two Cities: Charles Marville’s Photographs of Paris before Haussmann
The life of French photographer Charles Marville, the subject of a retrospective currently at the Metropolitan Museum, comes down to us hazy in its contours. Born Charles-François Bossu in 1813 to a family of artisans and tradesmen, Marville rid himself of “Bossu” (hunchback) after being teased about it at school, but the import of his chosen pseudonym is unknown.
Posted inNews
Huntington Acquires Rare Photographs of Early Southern California
Photography was rare in the early days of California urban development, but some pioneer practitioners did get out to the burgeoning bustle of Los Angeles and Santa Monica. Now one collector’s passionate focus on photography of 19th-to-mid-20th-century California has culminated in 4,600 images being acquired by the Huntington Library in San Marino.
Posted inArt
Paintings Pictured and Pictures Painted: South Asia Through Early Lenses
The Rubin Museum’s Allegory and Illusion: Early Portrait Photography from South Asia opens an often fantastic, frequently attenuated window to photography’s quick and global sprawl, and the regional and cultural ways it took early root.
