The PhotoBooks New Realities Photography in the 19th Century Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

New Realities

Photography in the 19th Century
Edited 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.

Professional criminals of America by Byrnes, Thomas F., 1844?-1910 Publication date 1886

William E. Marshall, Travels amongst the Todas, or The Study of a Primitive Tribe in South India (London: Longmans, Green, 1873)

Album photographique de l'artiste et de l'amateur
by Blanquart-Evrard, Louis Désiré, 1802-1872
Publication date 1851

Hoofdportaal van de kathedraal van Amiens ('Portail de la façade principale de la Cathédrale d'Amiens') (plaat 12 ) Charles Marville
Souvenirs photographiques, Lille 1853

Monographie de Notre-Dame de Paris, et de la nouvelle sacristie de MM. Lassus et Viollet-Le-Duc : contenant 63 planches, gravées par MM. Hibon, Ribault, Normand, etc., 12 planches photographiques, de MM. Bisson frères, 5 planches chromolithographiques, de M. Lemercier

Roger Fenton [photographer] & Thomas Agnew & Sons [publisher] & Moulin [publisher] & Williams & Co. [publisher] & P & D. Colnaghi & Co. [publisher]

No title Portrait of attributed to Lieutenant Archey R.A. in the Military Camp of the British Army during the Crimean War.

Roger Fenton, The valley of the shadow of death. Dirt road in ravine scattered with cannonballs. LC-USZC4-9217. One of the most famous photos of the Crimean campaign.

Roger Fenton's Crimean War photo series is the first historic attempt to portray war campaign with the help of new magic photo media, then still in its infancy. Sent as a replacement for the Richard Nicklin, a civilian photographer, who was lost at sea, along with his assistants, photographs, and equipment, when their ship sank during the hurricane that stuck the harbor at Balaklava on November 14, 1854. Fenton spend March-June 1855 in Crimea as an official campaign photographer, payed by the British government, recording participants and landscapes for posterity. These records never managed to capture battles, explosions, devastations, wounds, blood and tears, partly due to the limitations of photographic techniques of the period, but also because of official wish to glamorize the war and shift public attention away from government and military mismanagement, for which Crimean campaign became infamously known. However no text descriptions, drawings or paintings wouldn’t be able to surpass realism of Fenton’s photo of the besieged Sebastopol; the main allies ports at Kamiesh and Balaclava; mortar batteries, field trains, camps and everyday camp life; portraits of legendary allies leaders: Lord Raglan, Lord George Page, General Pennefather, Sir John Brown, Sir Colin Campbell, commander of the “Thin Red Line”; French Maréchal Pélissier, General Bosquet, “Little Nephew of the Great Uncle” Prince Napoleon; Turkish Ismail Pacha and Omar Pacha; officers of the Guards regiments, colorful highlanders and zouaves, sergeants, soldiers, orderlies, reverends, Royal comissioners, railway engineers, camp followers, laborers, fellow artists, war correspondents and civilian travellers. With the end of the Crimean War, quite modest public interest in Fenton's photos quickly faded away, in 1862 he left photography for good, dying several years later, financially broken and almost forgotten. In our days, however, historians unanimously recognize Fenton's remarkable accomplishments not only for his keen artistic eye and seminal role in establish photography as an artistic endeavor, but also honor him as one of the first professional war photographers.

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

Life with the Hamran Arabs: an account of a sporting tour of some officers of the guards in the Soudan, during the winter of 1874-5
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.

(OLMSTED, Frederick Law and BARKER, George). GARDNER, James T. Special Report of the New York State Survey on the Preservation of the Scenery of Niagara Falls, and Fourth Annual Report on the Triangulation of the State for the Year 1879. Albany: Charles Van Benthuysen & Sons, 1880. Octavo, original gilt-stamped brown cloth.

First edition of the 1880 New York Special Report, octavo edition, proposing preservation of Niagara Falls, substantially authored by Frederick Law Olmsted, with six folding maps (including two maps in the rear pocket), facsimile leaves from Hennepin’s New Discovery (1698), and featuring eight mounted vintage heliotype prints by renowned photographer George Barker.

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.