New Realities
Photography in the 19th CenturyEdited with text by Mattie Boom, Hans Rooseboom. Text by Saskia Asser, Steven F. Joseph, Martin Jürgens.
Presenting a selection of more than 300 photographs from the large and important collection of the Rijksmuseum, New Realities provides an impressive overview of the international development of photography. Major highlights include the earliest travel photos, motion studies by Eadweard Muybridge, advertising photography, portraiture, scenes of everyday life, the earliest photograph taken in Suriname and amazing shots that were made by microscopes and telescopes.
The invention of photography in 1839 led to a revolution in visual culture: photography both portrayed and created the modern world. For the first time, it was possible to depict and unlock every facet of that world. Photography secured a position in every field: in science, the arts, daily life and news reportage. New Realities conveys the dizzying breadth of its impact across cultures and disciplines.
Charles Thurston Thompson [photographer]
No title
Engraved crystal from the collection of the Louvre
Portrait of a Man in a Dressing Gown, anonymous, c. 1850 - c. 1860
daguerreotype, hand-coloured, h 153mm × w 122mm. More details
The sitter, wearing a patterned pink dressing gown, sprawls unabashedly in a green velvet armchair. He smokes a pipe and gazes out confidently at the photographer. This is not a portrait of a spouse or a loved one, but rather an apt characterization of a dandy, exactly as found in caricatures or fashion prints. The gold border is the perfect finishing touch.
FELIX BONFILS
(FRENCH, 1831 - 1885)
Architecture antique. Égypte. Grèce. Asie Mineure. Album de photographies, first edition , 1872
Réunion des Tuileries au Louvre, 1852-1857, album 3 : décor des deux cours sud, dites aujourd'hui Lefuel et Visconti, vol 3
Les travaux publics de la France Allard émile
Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou analyse électro-physiologique de l'expression des passions by Duchenne, Guillaume Benjamin
Publication date 1862
Publisher Paris : Jules Renouard
Large game shooting in Thibet and the north west
by Alexander Angus A . Kinloch
Publication date 1869
by Myers, Arthur Bowen Richards
Publication date 1876
Wild Life on a Tidal Water: The Adventures of a House-Boat and her Crew. 4to (xiv),145,[1]pp Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington Limited, London, 1890. HB.
A clean copy of the non-de-luxe edition bound in decorated blue cloth boards respined and with replacement endpapers. Number 119 of 300 (stated as 500). With 30 fine tissue guarded photogravures of the area around Breydon and the Port in Great Yarmouth.
This 1880 New York State Survey on the future of Niagara Falls, containing six large folding maps (two in the rear pocket) and eight vintage heliotype prints, was led by Frederick Law Olmsted and James T. Gardner. Their efforts came in response to concerns over preservation of the Falls in the 1870s. “Cherishing Niagara Falls as a great national symbol of nature, they called for a publicly owned reservation to safeguard the Niagara landscape… By 1879 Niagara activists began to have reason for optimism” when the governor and “legislature established a state survey ‘to determine the character of such defacements [at Niagara]… The survey, performed by Gardner and Olmsted, began at once and reached the anticipated conclusion that the private parceling of land around the cataract led to the unsightly and distasteful conditions at the Falls” (Irwin, New Niagara, 73).
Key to this Special Report’s power are its brilliant heliotype prints by George Barker, who was “renowned for views of Niagara Falls, in which rock and water spray are invested with spectacular drama” (Rosenblum, 140). It was Barker who especially “helped intensify the movement for a state reservation… [His] haunting photographs accompanying the 1880 survey depicted the starkly disfigured environs of Niagara. Barker’s images of the entrance to Goat Island, the enormous Bath Island paper mill, and the hotels and shops on the river’s edge verified that Niagara was far too disfigured to simply remove the structures and let nature take its course” (Irwin, 83). This is the octavo edition, with eight vintage heliotypes (and facsimile Plate XI), each measuring four-by-seven inches and tipped to heavy card stock, four folding maps (one lettered and outlined in red) and two large folding maps in rear pocket, two illustrated plates (one folding), along with facsimile leaves of selected text, a double-page illustration and the title page from Hennepin’s New Discovery of a Vast County in America (1698), as well as Reports by the Commissioner and the Director, Olmsted’s Notes, and numerous tables. Quarto edition with three maps published the same year, no priority established. Bookplate.
In 1901 French Professor of Natural Science Adolphe-Louis Donnadieu (1840-1911) published La photographie des objets immergés, in which he described the workings of the so-called 'Physiographe universel'. Donnadieu had invented this device with the aim of improving the way anatomical preparations were depicted. To achieve this, he photographed the preparations submerged in water. In the end, the Donnadieu method was overtaken by new developments in photography, such as chronophotography and X-ray photography.
Brinkley, Frank (Captain):
Japan, Described and Illustrated by the Japanese, Written By Eminent Japanese Authorities and Scholars, Boston, J.B. Millet Company, 1897~8, numerous editions (regular and deluxe formats) Folio (12 1 1/2 x 15+ in), decorative hard covers, decorative cord ties, table of contents at rear, 382 numbered pages of text, plates unnumbered. The books are organized into specific topics, covering Japanese festivals, history, customs, medieval Japan, etc.
