Autochromes from the Te Papa Collection

By Lissa Mitchell

MUSEUM OF NEW ZEALAND TE PAPA TONGAREWA - Lissa Mitchell, Curator of Historical Documentary Photography, explores the work of three photographers creating autochromes in early 20th-century New Zealand. more

In Search of True Color: Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s Flawed Images

By Erica X Eisen

Archived amid Prokudin-Gorsky’s vast photographic survey of the Russian Empire, we find images shot through with starshatter cracks, blebbed with mildew, and blurred by motion. Within such moments of unmaking, Erica X Eisen uncovers the overlapping forces at play behind these pioneering efforts in colour photography. 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

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