July / August 2002 Vol. 34, no. 4

Photographic Books at the National Library of Canada

The following text is taken from the National Library of Canada’s exhibition Photographic Books, which is on display in Exhibition Room D of the National Library of Canada, 395 Wellington Street in Ottawa, from 9:00 a.m. until 10:30 p.m. daily.

Photographic Book Illustration

Photography, as we know it  -  that is the two-step negative-positive process that results in the production of a paper print  -  can be traced to the early 1840s in both France and England. However, the ability to reproduce photographs on the printed page alongside letterpress text was an elusive goal, and it was not until the late 1880s that a practicable method was realized. Before the advent and commercialization of such modern photomechanical printing techniques, photographs appeared in books as original prints, individually pasted by hand onto blank or pre-printed pages. Viewed thus, in primarily literary contexts, they became an integral part of the act of reading, furnishing visual images not only to anchor but also to amplify descriptions, to conceptualize knowledge, and to visualize fantasies of place, people, events and things.

Drawing from the holdings of the National Library of Canada, Photographic Books features a selection of photographically illustrated books produced in Canada between 1858 and 1878, revealing a wide range of formats and applications. While many publications illustrated with original albumen prints were large, lavish and costly, others were simple, modest and inexpensive. Some had only a photographic frontispiece; others were extensively illustrated. In some, photographs were pasted onto blank pages, inserted unnumbered into the sequence of pages; in others, they were hand-tipped onto numbered pages with pre-printed letterpress captions; in still others, photographic prints were glued directly onto pages of text. The paper stock used to support the photographs varied in thickness and quality. In special cases, the photograph was mounted against a coloured background or with a simulated plate-mark to give the impression of a fine art print.

While photographs inserted by hand into books became part of print culture in the third quarter of the 19th century in Canada, various refinements finally allowed photographs to be reproduced cheaply and accurately in text-compatible form.

In British North America, original photographs in books were superseded by the photo-mechanical halftone reproduction. The advent of the halftone ushered in a new era in photojournalism and newspaper and magazine illustration The appearance, on July 7, 1888, of Volume I, Number 1 of the Dominion Illustrated, published by George Desbarats in Montreal, accelerated the onset of modern visual culture in Canada and nurtured a new sense of nationhood.

Habits of seeing have changed little since the first appearance of the Dominion Illustrated, and we are now inured to seeing continuous-tone illustrations on the same page as line material and printed text. Those habits make it particularly difficult to appreciate and to assess the impact of the photographically illustrated book on the reading public in 19th-century British North America.

Photographic Books continues until Saturday, August 31, 2002.