Cornell University Library Digital Collections

History of Photography

The History of Photography set serves to introduce photography’s expansive and complex technological, cultural, and aesthetic histories. Drawing from the Johnson Museum of Art and the Cornell University Library—particularly its division of Rare and Manuscript Collections—it assembles objects that represent a spectrum of common chemical photographic processes, including daguerreotypes, salted paper prints, albumen prints, tintypes, cyanotypes, gelatin silver prints, chromogenic prints, instant prints, and inkjet prints; ink-based printing methods like photogravure, woodburytype, and halftone; and formats including cartes de visite, stereographs, photographic albums and publications, real-photo postcards, and popular objects like buttons with integrated photographs.

While representing changes to photographic technology as well as to photography’s status and uses, these objects also suggest the place—sometimes central—of photography within a multitude of human endeavors, from self-fashioning to social and political maneuvering to war; scientific and pseudo-scientific research; archaeological and art historical enquiry to artmaking; and from photography as an amateur or personal pursuit to the creation and development of a massive photographic industry.

As the bulk of Cornell’s photographs are by American and European makers, this introduction to photography presents largely its manifestations within Western culture. Photographs that serve the colonialist project, are implicated in its processes, or respond to its realities are integral here. Examples include Désiré Charnay’s Cités et ruines américaines (1863); Samuel Bourne’s view of Nainital in the Indian state of Uttarakhand (1860s); Alexander Gardner’s Photographs of Red Cloud and Principal Chiefs of Dacotah Indians (1872); and an ambrotype case decorated with an interpretation of John Vanderlyn’s 1847 painting Landing of Columbus, which contains a photograph of a group of white tourists posing at Niagara Falls. This topic is further dealt with in the sets focused on Asian Studies and inequality and legacies of discrimination.

With roughly half of the materials in this set drawn from the collection of the Johnson Museum, the development of photography as an artform is a major theme. Works by nineteenth-century pioneers including Hill and Adamson and Charles Nègre suggest early conceptions about what art photography might be, while later photographs by Peter Henry Emerson and Pictorialists including Alfred Stieglitz and Anne Brigman represent the confidence of a younger generation that photography could be art, and their ambition to establish this as widely accepted fact. Important movements, strains, and figures in twentieth-century and contemporary art photography are likewise represented as the collections allow.

Bound volumes

Bound volumes included in this set can be previewed or viewed in their entirety. Please note that some of these digitized volumes belong to repositories other than Cornell, and that Cornell's own copies of the same volumes may vary slightly.

• Historique et Description des Procedes du Daguerreotype et du Diorama
• Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing or the Process by Which Natural Objects May be Made to Delineate Themselves Without the Aid of the Artist's Pencil
• Dickens family album
• Palais du Louvre et des Tuileries
• La tour de trois cents mètres
• The Acropolis of Athens: Illustrated picturesquely and architecturally in photography
• Urformen der Kunst
• Excursions daguerriennes: Vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe
• Egypt and Palestine photographed and described
• Photographic views of Sherman's Campaign
• Cités et ruines américaines
• Photographs of Red Cloud and principal chiefs of Dacotah Indians