Bonnard, Denis, Vuillard, Vallotton, Evenepoel, Rivière and Breitner.

This catalogue and exhibition unveils the importance and use of 'snapshot' photography' by and in the paintings of the above artists. This important publication highlights the possibilities of the 1888 Kodak No.1 box camera and the dawn of 'amateur' photography.

'You press the button, we do the rest', the famous Kodak slogan, marks the beginning of photographic popularization. From now everybody could add 'taking pictures' too their leisure-time. Inspired by the new possibilities of' 'drawning by light' many artists took up the camera to register their daily environment and used these images to create their paintings or graphic art.

The catalogue illustrates how this influenced the composition in their works as well as experiments with darkness and light. The snapshot as an important aid and tool in art was born. Being works of art themselves, the above painters never exhibited their photographic treasures.

Time and Photography

Despite our stereotypical ideas on photographic images as snapshots (slices of time), photography is fundamentally a time-based medium.

The relationships between photography and time are manifold: time can be directly represented within the image, it can be its theme and philosophical horizon, but it can also represent the global framework in which photographic practices develop and change through time.

It is the ambition of this book to bring together the various aspects of time in photography as well as of photography in time, and to illustrate them in a series of case studies that focus on seminal authors (e.g. Fox Talbot, Victor Burgin, Robert Morris) and genres (e.g. spirit photography, montage photobooks and tableau photography), with examples ranging from the very first photographic pictures to the most recent cross-medial uses of photography in and outside art.

Written by international specialists for a non-specialist audience and displaying extraordinary breadth and erudition, this book reshapes our vision of photography in order to include many crucial yet overlooked aspects of time, culture and art.

Click cover the publisher's bookpage.

Das Kaiser Panorama lavishly describes and illustrates the history of the Kaiser Panorama, a huge stereoscopic peepshow which enables a small group of people to view simultaneously a series of stereoscopic photographs through a series of stereoscopic lenses.

The booklet describes different Kaiser Panorama's in München and Altötting and illustrate in colour stereoscopic views from the photo collections in the Müncher Stadtmuseums.

Similar with the through panorama buildings, the Kaiser Panorama was an other early form of mass entertainment.

Click cover for more information.

Darwin's Camera tells the extraordinary story of how Charles Darwin changed the way pictures are seen and made. Darwin introduced the idea of using photographs to illustrate a scientific theory, his was the first photographically illustrated science book ever published.

Using photographs to depict fleeting expressions of emotion, laughter, crying, anger, and so on, as they flit across a person's face, he managed to produce dramatic images at a time when photography was famously slow and awkward. The book describes how Darwin struggled to get the pictures he needed, scouring the galleries, bookshops, and photographic studios of London, looking for pictures to satisfy his demand for expressive imagery

He finally settled on one the giants of photographic history, the eccentric art photographer Oscar Rejlander, to make his pictures. It was a peculiar choice. Darwin was known for his meticulous science, while Rejlander was notorious for altering and manipulating photographs.

Darwin never studied art formally, but he was always interested in art and often drew on art knowledge as his work unfolded. He mingled with the artists on the voyage of HMS Beagle, he visited art museums to examine figures and animals in paintings, associated with artists, and read art history books.

Era Palermo

Il libro presenta diversi motivi di interesse, coniugando l’amore per i luoghi alla passione per il collezionismo delle fotografie originali. Le immagini sono state scelte con cura preferendo le più rare, soprattutto le inedite, in equa rappresentanza dei più importanti fotografi, siciliani e non, che hanno operato a Palermo.

Di tutti si è cercato di fornire notizie sintetiche sulla vita, l’opera e l’importanza nella storia della fotografia. Ogni immagine è accompagnata da una didascalia che riporta anche un indice di valore, sintetizzato da simboli grafici, ad indicare la fascia di prezzo a cui appartiene la fotografia originale.

Circa 200 foto. Testi sul viaggio in Italia, sul collezionismo di immagini, e biografie di tutti i fotografi presenti nel volume. Inoltre, a corredo di molte delle immagini pubblicate, i brani descrittivi tratti dai libri dei grandi viaggiatori del passato.

Click cover for more information from the publisher.

Les 'Editions Astarté' is specializing in vintage nude photography books (and other erotic artworks) a timeless subject and seen in photographs from the very dawn of the medium. The recent book, 'l' Atrium et autres délires photographique ...' illustrates for the first time a long awaited selection of these intriguing nudes in classic settings, taken in the Atrium and garden of Jules Richard by him and various other photographers.

'l' Atrium et autres délires photographiques' offers some wonderful examples of (stereo) nude photography with a strong connection leading to French Cabaret such as Moulin Rouge & Folies Bergere but especially to Prof. Desbonnet's 'Physical Culture' movement and method. Today it is known that these models where frequent practioneers of Desbonnet's popular gym-rooms which became a standard for physical culture all over Europe and are the true forerunner of today's fitness centers and their popularity.

Although these Jules Richard nudes can be classified as 'risque' photographs, they where tolerated in their time since they focus on the importance of body culture (a healthy mind in a healthy body) and are set in a fake decor inspired by Greek Antiquity decorated with props such as Sater statues and antique instruments. Click for enlarged cover of book.
Minor drawback is that the images are reproduced in black & white, hiding the wonderful monochrome sepia tones of the originals. Click to see two other Astarté publications.

Since the Kodak publications 'Care and Identification of 19^th. Century Photographic Prints' by James M. Reilly (1986) and the one year earlier 'Conservation of Photographs', the importance and appreciation of historical photographs grew immensely and ignited a start of scientific & historical research into the field of photography, resulting in a vast library of important new books.

Consequently, the identification, conservation and restoration of modern digital print technologies needs our attention too. Martin Jürgens wrote with the 'Digital Print' an immensely valuable source about the past forty years of modern print technologies used by artists.

This invaluable resource demystifies the complex, rapidly changing, and sometimes confusing world of digital print technologies. It describes the major digital printing processes used by photographers and artists in recent years, explaining and illustrating materials and their deterioration, methods of identification, and options for acquiring and preserving digital prints.

A removable poster provides a ready reference for identifying specific digital processes and materials.
Click book-cover to open the Getty information page on the Digital Print.

Le Vocabulaire Technique de la Photography
Directed by Anne Cartier-Bresson, niece of Henri Cartier-Bresson

Since the Kodak publications 'Care and Identification of 19^th. Century Photographic Prints' by James M. Reilly (1986) and the one year earlier 'Conservation of Photographs', the importance and appreciation of historical photographs grew immensely and ignited a start of scientific & historical research into the field of photography, resulting in a vast library of important new books.

Besides the two, also new, subsequent titles below, 'l' Autochrome Lumière ...', 'Photographs of the Past' (also available in French), the 'Le Vocabulaire Technique de la Photography' is the most extented. This impressive book, also know as 'The VTP', has in relation to both latter titles the author Bertrand Lavédrine in common.

The book is impressive, as well are those below, due to his invaluable richness of information featuring many visual, historical, technical & scientific know-how on a myriad of vintage photographical techniques. The 400 illustrations are printed in quadri to help the user in identifying the process used for specific samples in collections.

The VTP & all books referred to in relation with the VTP are a welcome addition to any library which is seriously concerned with the preservation, conservation & restoration of vintage photographs and our visual heritage. They should not be missed. Click book-cover to open the press PDF of the VTP.

l' Autochrome Lumière - Secrets d' ateliers et défis industriels

Another invaluable source, rich of information featuring many visual, historical, technical & scientific know-how, this time devoted to one process, the Autochrome or first commercial and succesfull true color proces in the field of photography.

Bertrand Lavédrine, co-author of the above VTP, offers an extreamely detailed research of the first succesfull color photographs develloped by the brother's Lumière who also played an importand role, among many others, in the devellopment of projected moving images, the cinema.

The autochrome is often referred to as the most beautiful color proces to date du to his wonderfull pointillistic & picturalistic appearenance. The latter can easily be seen in the wonderfull reproductions of the book, as well on de autochrome page devoted to the collection of Florent van Hoof.

l' Autochrome Lumière ... is published by and can be ordered from Les Editions du Cths in Paris. By the same author, the Cths also published the subsequent title '(re)Connaitre et Conserver les Photographies Anciennes' which is a book similar in scope as the VTP.

'(re)Connaitre ...' is also available in English publisched by The Getty as 'Photographs of the Past, Process and Preservation'.

 (information from publisher)



Sequences, Contemporary Chronophotography and Experimental Digital Art

This volume explores the proliferation of contemporary art that uses sequences of images to explore ideas of space, time, movement and duration. Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge and other 'chronophotographers' first explored these ideas at the turn of the nineteenth century; since then chronophotography has been in the shadow of cinema, but now its emerging once again in post-cinema practices, digital art and new experimental photography.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, artists have found that sequences offer new opportunities for exploring continuing issues regarding aesthetics that operate at the intersection of time and space.

The book contains a number of illustrated essays by international critics and theorists and discusses the work of a wide range of artists engaged in contemporary chronophotography. The introduction also uses insights from chronophotography to dispel the myth of persistence of vision.

The book can be ordered from Wallflower Press.

'Brought To Light - Photography And The Invisible'

Withouth doubt one of the most fascinating themes in early photography is the representation of scientific research. From a todays 'point of view', most of these images looks surprisingly modern even in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art where this exhibition is running.

(information from the exhibition web site)
Modern science and photography flowered simultaneously in the early 19^th century, and photography was adopted as a scientific tool from the first years of its invention.

Over the course of the century, scientists captured previously hidden realms, making pictures using the microscope and the telescope and using photography to analyze motion, see into faraway galaxies, and look inside the human body.

Brought to Light includes examples of early scientific photography and invites you to imagine what pictures of the invisible might have meant at a time when the worlds revealed by contemporary technologies such as satellite imaging and PET scans were utterly unimaginable.

Click book-cover to visit the exhibition website.
The catalogue is nicely printed and displays a great lay-out.

Please order from Yale University Press or read more information.

The Strange Case of William Mumler
The story of the birth of spirit photography and the controversy surrounding its discovery.

In the 1860s, William Mumler photographed ghosts, or so he claimed. Faint images of the dearly departed lurked in the background with the living, like his well-known photo of the recently assassinated Abraham Lincoln comforting Mary Todd.

The practice came to be known as spirit photography, and some believed Mumler was channeling the dead. Skeptics, however, called it a fraudulent trick on the gullible, taking advantage of the grieving at a time of suffering and loss. Mumler’s insistence that his work brought back the dead led to a sensational trial in 1869 that was the talk of the nation.

In The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer, Louis Kaplan brings together, for the first time, Mumler’s haunting images, his revealing memoir, and rich primary sources, including newspaper articles and P. T. Barnum’s famous indictment of Mumler in Humbugs of the World. Kaplan also contributes two extended essays, which offer a historical perspective of the Mumler phenomena and delve into the sociocultural and theoretical issues surrounding this vivid ghost story.

See some Ghosts on Early Visual Media.

Faces of the Living Dead

Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, a new British Library publication by Martyn Jolly, examines the phenomenon of spirit photography that developed in the 1870s and is the first book of its kind to bring together the extensive collection of spirit photographs from the British Library's Barlow Collection.

Illustrated by works of the leading spirit photographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Ada Deane, William Hope, Frederick Hudson and Edward Wyllie
It also includes spirit photographs of one of spirit photography's most high-profile advocates, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. The craze for photographing 'spirits' was rooted in the popularity of Spiritualism and psychic research that developed during the period from the 1860s to the 1930s.

The appearance of ghostly figures, spirit writing and ectoplasm in these portraits was considered by many as nothing short of miraculous. In 1874 the eminent chemist and physicist William Crookes used the galvanic light of electric lamps to photograph the beautiful figure of the spirit Katie King, which had supposedly been materialized by the young Hackney medium Florence Cook.

See some Ghosts on Early Visual Media.
Click on cover for information or order this book from the publisher.

THE PERFECT MEDIUM
Photography and the Occult

LE TROISIÈME ŒIL
La photographie et l'occulte






Exhibition information

Beyond Photography.

John and Katie used to be sceptical (to put it mildly) about crop circles, angels, ghosts, fairies, UFOs and all other aspects of the paranormal.

But a few years ago, as they photographed the grounds of their new house, they started to find the most extraordinary images appearing on their prints. Though professional designers and photographers, they couldn't explain them.

They soon realised that their experience was not unique. Orbs have been appearing all over the world over the last few years. First dismissive, then intrigued, this is the fullest personal account in the world of one couple's experience of this new phenomenon. Documented by thousands of incredible photographs, their journey has led them inexorably to some extraordinary conclusions.

There are realities running parallel to ours. We are not the dominant life form on this planet. We share this world with a super non-human intelligence which interacts with human consciousness.
It is an intelligence that is empathic, symbiotic and multifaceted; they call it 'LIGHT-FORMS!' - and, if they are correct, it is right next to you, right now!

Click on cover for more information or to order this book.

The Haunted Gallery.

The dawn of cinema dramatically changed our visual culture.

'The Haunted Gallery' is a fascinating and well illustrated book showing the influences of the young medium, Moving Pictures, in relation to Painting, Photography, Magic Lantern pictures, Astronomy and Stage Magic at the 'hing point' of the 19^th. & 20^th. Centuries.

This groundbreaking book explores the history of Visual Media in Britain during this key period that witnessed a transformation from stasis to movement across the entire range of Visual Media.

For this as it may, this book should become one of the inavitable reference sources for all 'vintage and today's' media history enthusiasts.
Click on cover for more information or to order this book.

'The Haunted Gallery' (291 pages) can be ordered directly from: Yale University Press.

See also Routledge's Encyclopedia of Early Cinema

'Impressed By Light' is an highly valuable exhibition catalogue on the Art of the Calotype.

The book reproduces more than 120 photographs printed from paper negatives, or calotypes, many of them never published before.

Besides the plates, 10 well researched chapters unveil the history and development of the calotype or Talbotype as named after his inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot.

Of invaluable importance is the addition of a biographical dictionary featuring more than 500 British calotypists.

'Impressed By Light' (438 pages) can be ordered directly from: Yale University Press

Visit the Early Processes page on Early Visual Media.
Click on cover for more information or to order this book.

An exceptional 'key reference' book for the formative years till the era of the dry - plate in America. Author Keith F. Davis demonstrates various key themes and genres in early American photography, placed in a sociological / historical context.

The various chapters offer new essential reading on photography and his first processes, daguerreotypes, calotypes, ambrotypes, albumin, collodion, ... etc.

In addition to the academic value of the chapters in this new publication, available from 1 november 2007, the book is richly illustrated with more than 600 images in tritone and four-colour.

All photographs are from the 'Hallmark Photographic Collection' at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Both,text and images will confront the reader with 'The Face of a Nation' seen through a new medium, started with 'The mirror with a memory' or daguerreotype.

The Origins of American Photography (360 pages) can be ordered directly from: Yale University Press
Click on cover for more information or to order this book.

Visit the Early Processes page on Early Visual Media.

Kunst und Magie der Daguerreotypie.

This lavishly illustrated book documents the early history of Swiss photography through the collection of W. T. Bosshard.
Besides well researched information on the Swiss daguerreotype the book also describes the technical and chemical trivia on this first photographical process.

Many of the daguerreotypes are published here for the first time, unfortunately with a highly glossy superfluous varnish on the images to resemble more closely the real 'look' of the process. The typical 'mirror-like' aspect of a daguerreotype can never be reproduced in a book but is only seen in an original sample.

'Kunst und Magie der Daguerreotypie' was published to accompany the exhibition:
'Lichtspuren - Daguerreotypien aus Schweizer Sammlungen 1840 bis 1860'.

For European orders please contact daguerreotype@bluewin.ch.
Hardcover - 248 pages, 230 color illustrations. Price is € 48 or $ 65.

Click cover for more information by the publisher 'Carl Mautz Publishing'.
Non European orders please contact cmautz@carlmautz.com.

Visit the Early Processes page on Early Visual Media.

Thierry Lefebvre et Laurent Mannoni.

Card Photographs
A Guide to their History and Value



This well illustrated book acts as a price guide for the collector of Card photographs. Carte-de-Visite, Cabinet cards & Stereo-photographs.

This book is older than the Photographic Cases (see above) in the same series which explanes that most images are illustrated in black & white.

''Card Photographs: A Guide to their History and Value' is available from Bushwood Books. P&P free within the UK.

This lavishly illustrated book acts as a price guide for the collector of Picture and Photo Frames. The book offers a wide overview of mostly small sized frames.
Many frames are depicted with an image inside, unfortunately not always with with the original content.

Besides a 'History of Frames' the publication offers chapters on 'Furniture and Art styles in relation to frames', - 'The Table Top Frame', - 'Wooden Picture Frame Terminology', - 'Table Top Terminology', - 'Photographic Terminology', - 'Dating of Frames', - 'Frame Care and Repair', - 'Frame Collecting', - 'Valuing Frames', - 'Wall Frames'.

''Collecting Picture and Photo Frames' is available from Bushwood Books.
P&P free within the UK.
Click cover for detailed description or order the book by e-mail from info@bushwoodbooks.co.uk.

The Art of framing is often overlooked and / or separated from the original content of the frame. For this, the book offers an invaluable image source to any frame collector no matter the kind of images embellished by this art form.

Since many of the illustrations depict photo frames this price guide is a strong addition to any library of the private collector. Click here to see some sample pages.

Early Visual Media is a non-commercial, informative & historical web site. The current page guides you via e-mail and web links to informative and historical sources in books, catalogues, academic journals, video's, DVD, etc. Publications can be purchased without interference of Early Visual Media. Increase your sales figures
Visit also the exhibition announcements page for related exhibitions.

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