<p>This is an assortment of photographs of headshots, stills, and film promotion photographs.  Photographers include Clarence Bull, Herbert Mitchell, and Nickolas Muray.  The primary date range is from the 1920s to the 1950s, although there are eight photographs of Mary Pickford from the 1910s.<br></p> <p>Studios represented include, RKO, MGM, Warner Bros., Paramount, Columbia Pictures and Culver Pictures.</p> <p>Additional Learning Lab collections with PHC objects include<em> Movie Making </em>with photographs related to film and movie production and <em>Theatre</em> for photographs related to stage performances. </p> <p>Keyword: actor, actress, film star, celebrity, headshot, movie still, motion picture production, autograph, famous people, culture makers, movie studio production, movies, films, motion pictures, cinema, movie history, film history, cinema history</p>

<p>This is a selection of photogravures by Adolf Fassbender.<br></p> <p>For additional images, search collection.si.edu.</p> <p>Keywords: photomechanical, art photography, Pictorialism</p>

<p>This is a collection of photographs by Jesse Tarbox Beals.<br></p> <p>For additional images, search collections.si.edu.</p> <p>Keywords: photojournalism, photojournalist, women photographers, domestic exterior, domestic interior, portraits, fireplace, bedroom, living room, dining room, sitting room, African American man, hired help, women, paintings, domestic furnishings, painted portraits</p>

<p>This is a selection of photographs by Susana Raab.<br></p> <p>Copyright Susana Raab.</p> <p>Keywords: women photographers, color photography, documentary photography, state fair, food, Elvis, Pepsi, hot dog contest, Superman, drive through, wheelchair</p>

<p>This is a collection of work by Lauren Greenfield from the Photographic History Collection. <br></p> <p>Copyright Lauren Greenfield.</p> <p>Keywords: women, girls, body image, body shaming, women's health, women's mental health, eating disorders</p>

<p>This is a small sampling of toy and souvenir camera from the Photographic History Collection.<br></p> <p>For specific cameras, search collections.si.edu. </p>

<p>This is a collection of work by Bonnie Collier.<br></p> <p>Copyright Bonnie Collier</p> <p>Keywords: digital photography, landscape photography, manipulated photography, women photographer, combination photography, art photography</p>

<p>The Annie Appel collection at the NMAH Photographic History Collection consists of forty-two gelatin silver portraits of people who attended various Occupy protests. <br></p> <p>Copyright Anne Appel</p>

<p>This is a selection of mutoscope title cards and apparatus. <br></p> <p>The Mutoscope Collection in the National Museum of American History’s Photographic History Collection is among the most significant of its kind in any museum. Composed of 3 cameras, 13 viewers, 59 movie reels, and 53 title cards (movie posters), the collection documents the early years of the most successful and influential motion picture company of the industry’s formative period. It also showcases a unique style of movie exhibition that outlasted its early competitors, existing well into the 20th century.</p> <p>Keywords: Mutoscope, early motion picture, moving picture, movie </p> <p>Written by Ryan Lintelman for a finding aid for the Photographic History Collection:</p> <p> The American Mutoscope Company was founded in 1895 by a group of four men, Elias Koopman, Herman Casler, Henry Marvin, and William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, to manufacture a motion picture viewer called the mutoscope, and to produce films for exhibition. </p> <p>Dickson had recently left the employ of Thomas Edison, for whom he had solved the problem of “doing for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear” by inventing the modern motion picture. Casler and Dickson worked together to perfect the mutoscope, which exhibited films transferred to a series of cards mounted in the style of a flip book on a metal core, and avoided Edison’s patents with this slightly different style of exhibition. </p> <p>The company’s headquarters in New York City featured a rooftop studio on a turntable to ensure favorable illumination, and the short subjects made here found such success that by 1897, the Edison company’s dominance of the industry was in danger. American Mutoscope became American Mutoscope & Biograph in 1899, when the namesake projector, invented by Casler, became the most used in the industry.</p> <p>Mutoscope viewers were found in many amusement areas and arcades until at least the 1960s. Their inexpensiveness and short, often comical or sensational subjects allowed the machines a far longer life than the competing Edison Kinetoscope. The company also found success in its production and projection of motion pictures, though its activity was mired by patent litigation involving Thomas Edison through the 1910s. </p> <p>The notable director D. W. Griffith was first hired as an actor, working with pioneering cinematographer G. W. “Billy” Bitzer, before moving behind the camera at Biograph, and making 450 films for the company. Griffith and Bitzer invented cinematographic techniques like the fade-out and iris shot, made the first film in Hollywood, and launched the careers of early stars Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish. The company, simply renamed the Biograph Company in 1909, went out of business in 1928, after losing Griffith and facing a changing movie industry.  </p> <p>The Museum’s collection was acquired in the years between 1926 and the mid-1970s. The original mutograph camera and two later models of the camera were given to the Smithsonian in 1926 by the International Mutoscope Reel Company, which inherited Biograph’s mutoscope works and continued making the viewers and reels through the 1940s. </p> <p>The viewers, reels, and posters in the collection were acquired for exhibition in the National Museum of American History, and were later accessioned as objects in the Photographic History Collection. Many of the mutoscope reels in the collection date to the period from 1896-1905, and show early motion picture subjects, some of which were thought to be lost films before their examination in 2008.</p> <p><br></p>

<p>This is a sampling of tintypes and cameras used to make tintypes from the Photographic History Collection. <br></p> <p>This sampling includes works by contemporary photographer Ed Drew, of Native Americans and military personnel. These works are copyrighted by Ed Drew.  </p> <p>This sampling includes tintypes that are cased and uncased, in paper mats, in album pages, in frames, and often just the tintype plate itself. Some are lightly colored and others heavily painted.</p> <p>Keywords: tintype, ferrotype, melaniotype, occupational portrait, portrait photography, studio photography, exterior portrait</p> <p>Note: For additional images search collections.si.edu. The Scovil Company, held by the Division of Work & Industry, holds a particularly interesting group of pins and buttons with photography of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and others who ran for office. The Military History Collection also holds tintypes of soldiers and other military related themes.</p> <h2>Tintypes</h2> <p>The NMAH Photographic History Collection (PHC) has over 3000 tintype photographs dating from the beginnings of the process in 1856 to the present. ‘Tintype’ was coined and became the favored name.</p> <p>Tintypes in the PHC are found in albums, the Kaynor Union Case collection, and as individual photographs. The original tintype process patent was assigned to William and Peter Neff in 1856. William Neff died a short time later, but his son Peter, who named the process Melainotype, continued on with his work. The earliest tintypes in the PHC are a group of more than thirty Peter Neff Melainotypes, some of which date back to 1856 and contain notes written by Peter Neff. Shortly after the Melainotype, Victor Griswold introduced a very similar process on thinner, lighter iron plates and called them Ferrotypes. The PHC has tintypes ranging from rare large images between 5”x7” and 10”x12”down to small images cut to 6mm diameter to fit jewelry. The Melainotypes are between 1/6 plate and 4”x5” in size and many have indistinct images. There are also unexposed Melainotype plates including a pack of 1/6 plates and large whole-plates with four decorated oval borders that were designed to be cut into smaller quarter plates after exposure.</p> <p>The great majority of tintype photographs are studio portraits, including the very popular ‘Gem’ size (about ¾” x 1”). Almost every gem tintype in the PHC is an individual head and shoulders portraits, the only exceptions seen being a full length portrait and a head and shoulders portrait of a couple. Most of these gem portraits are in small gem albums designed to hold two to six gems per page. However, several gems are mounted on cartes-de-visite (CDV) size cards and set in specifically designed album pages. Some of these CDV mounted gems are in elaborate miniature frames attached to the card. The tintypes larger than gem size show a greater variety of subject matter, but still with a main focus on individual portraits, this is especially true of the smaller 1/16 and 1/9 plate images. The most common outdoor subjects noted are people standing in front of their homes and photographs of people proudly standing with, or sitting on, their horse or horses and buggy. One of the largest tintypes is a 9”x 7” outdoor view of a row of townhouses with a couple standing on one of the balconies. There is also an outdoor tintype of men fishing along with another of their days catch.</p> <p>One common subject in tintype photography, as noted in textbooks, is the civil war soldier. The durability of the tintype meant that photographs taken in the field could be sent home. However, this category of tintype is not well represented in the PHC, with less than thirty noted due to the fact that the majority of the Smithsonian’s Civil War tintypes are located mainly in the Military History Collection. Most of the PHC examples of Civil War tintypes are in the Kaynor collection of cased images.</p> <p>Some of the tintypes in the PHC are hand-colored. This coloring varies from light tinting of faces and hands to heavy overpainting that obscures the underlying tintype image. A number of tintypes, occupational views, depict people with the apparatus of their occupations. Some are posed studio shots and others appear to be photographs of people at their place of work. Among the occupational views are images of milk maids, doctor, grocery delivery man, weavers, fireman, ice delivery man, craftsman, cobbler, shoe shiners, mail carrier, surveyor, pipe liners, and other tintypes of people wearing work clothes and posing with tools. </p> <p><br></p>

<p>This is an assortment of photographs from the Photographic History Collection related to meals and eating.<br></p> <p>Additional photographs from the Photographic History Collection related to food can be found in Learning Lab collections Food, Eateries, Agriculture, and Kitchens. </p> <p>For additional images, search collections.si.edu.</p> <p>Keywords: Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, dinner table, kitchen table, taking tea, drinking coffee</p>

<p>This is a selection of works from the Photographic History Collection by Donald Mennie.<br></p> <p>For additional images, search collections.si.edu.</p> <p>Keywords: photogravure, China, architecture, sacred buildings, tombs, temple, palace, gates, memorials, farmers, wagons, commerce, tourism, gate, wall, sculpture, pack animals</p>