The Color of Memory: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet

By Grace Linden

By the time of Albert Kahn’s death in 1940, the French banker and philanthropist had amassed a collection of more than 72,000 autochrome photographs. Grace Linden explores the Archives de la Planète — his sprawling, global project to document and preserve the fast-changing world — and uncovers a latent nostalgia in the hyperreal hues of early color photography. more

Scenes of Reading on the Early Portrait Postcard

By Melina Moe and Victoria Nebolsin

When picture postcards began circulating with a frenzy across the United States and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, a certain motif proved popular: photographs of people posed with books. Melina Moe and Victoria Nebolsin explore this paradoxical sign of interiority and find a class of image that traverses the poles of absorption and theatricality. more

Through the Cheval Glass: Reproduction in the Photographs of Clementina Hawarden

By Stassa Edwards

Soon after Clementina Hawarden began taking photographs in the mid-19th century, her eye caught on doubles, reflections, her daughters glimpsed in the mirror. Stassa Edwards examines the role that reproduction — photographic, biological — plays in this oeuvre, and searches for the only person not captured clearly: Hawarden herself. more

Rhapsodies in Blue: Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes

By Paige Hirschey

In an era when the Enlightenment’s orderly vision of the natural world began to unravel, Anna Atkins produced the world’s first photography book: a collection of cyanotypes, created across a decade beginning in 1843, that captured algal forms in startling blue-and-white silhouettes. Paige Hirschey situates Atkins’ efforts among her naturalist peers, discovering a form of illustration that, rather than exhibit an artist’s mastery over nature, allowed specimens to “illustrate” themselves. more

The Kept and the Killed

By Erica X Eisen

Of the 270,000 photographs commissioned by the US Farm Security Administration to document the Great Depression, more than a third were “killed”. Erica X Eisen examines the history behind this hole-punched archive and the unknowable void at its center. more

Photographing the Dark: Nadar’s Descent into the Paris Catacombs

By Allison C. Meier

Today the Paris Catacombs are illuminated by electric lights and friendly guides. But when Félix Nadar descended into this “empire of death” in the 1860s artificial lighting was still in its infancy: the pioneering photographer had to face the quandary of how to take photographs in the subterranean dark. Allison C. Meier explores Nadar’s determined efforts (which involved Bunsen batteries, mannequins, and a good deal of patience) to document the beauty and terror of this realm of the dead. more

Yvette Borup Andrews: Photographing Central Asia

By Lydia Pyne

Although often overshadowed by the escapades of her more famous husband (said by some to be the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones), the photographs taken by Yvette Borup Andrews on their first expeditions through Central Asia stand today as a compelling contribution to early visual anthropology. Lydia Pyne looks at the story and impact of this unique body of images. more

Stuffed Ox, Dummy Tree, Artificial Rock: Deception in the Work of Richard and Cherry Kearton

By John Bevis

John Bevis explores the various feats of cunning and subterfuge undertaken by the Kearton brothers — among the very first professional wildlife photographers — in their pioneering attempts to get ever closer to their subjects. more

The Secret History of Holywell Street: Home to Victorian London’s Dirty Book Trade

By Matthew Green

Victorian sexuality is often considered synonymous with prudishness, conjuring images of covered-up piano legs and dark ankle-length skirts. Historian Matthew Green uncovers a quite different scene in the sordid story of Holywell St, 19th-century London's epicentre of erotica and smut. more

Neanderthals in 3D: L’Homme de La Chapelle

By Lydia Pyne

More than just a favourite of Victorian home entertainment, the stereoscope and the 3D images it created were also used in the field of science. Lydia Pyne explores how the French palaeontologist Marcellin Boule utilised the device in his groundbreaking monograph analysing one of the early-20th-century's most significant archaeological discoveries - the Neanderthal skeleton of La Chapelle. more

Julia Margaret Cameron in Ceylon: Idylls of Freshwater vs. Idylls of Rathoongodde

By Eugenia Herbert

Leaving her close-knit artistic community on the Isle of Wight at the age of sixty to join her husband on the coffee plantations of Ceylon was not an easy move for the celebrated British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Eugenia Herbert explores the story behind the move and how the new environment was to impact Cameron's art. more

The Naturalist and the Neurologist: On Charles Darwin and James Crichton-Browne

By Stassa Edwards

Stassa Edwards explores Charles Darwin's photography collection, which includes almost forty portraits of mental patients given to him by the neurologist James Crichton-Browne. The study of these photographs, and the related correspondence between the two men, would prove instrumental in the development of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin's book on the evolution of emotions. more

The Serious and the Smirk: The Smile in Portraiture

By Nicholas Jeeves

Why do we so seldom see people smiling in painted portraits? Nicholas Jeeves explores the history of the smile through the ages of portraiture, from Da Vinci's Mona Lisa to Alexander Gardner's photographs of Abraham Lincoln. more

Sir Arthur and the Fairies

By Mary Losure

In the spring of 1920, at the beginning of a growing fascination with spiritualism brought on by the death of his son and brother in WWI, Arthur Conan Doyle took up the case of the Cottingley Fairies. Mary Losure explores how the creator of Sherlock Holmes became convinced that the 'fairy photographs' taken by two girls from Yorkshire were real. more

Remembering Scott

By Max Jones

A century on from his dramatic death on the way back from the South Pole, the memory of the explorer Captain Scott and his ill-fated Terra Nova expedition is stronger than ever. Max Jones explores the role that the iconic visual record has played in keeping the legend alive. more

The Snowflake Man of Vermont

By Keith C. Heidorn

Keith C. Heidorn takes a look at the life and work of Wilson Bentley, a self-educated farmer from a small American town who, by combining a bellows camera with a microscope, managed to photograph the dizzyingly intricate and diverse structures of the snow crystal. more