<p>#nmahphc</p> <p>This is a small sampling of view cameras from the Photographic History Collection. </p> <p>For additional cameras, search collections.si.edu</p> <p><br></p>

<p>This is a selection of Leica cameras from Photographic History Collection (PHC) at the National Museum of American History (NMAH). The PHC holds  has a significant collection of Leica cameras, lenses, and accessories totaling more than 200 items including over 25 cameras from the 1920s to the 2000s. This Learning Lab collection includes a pdf finding aid for Leica cameras.  Included in the PHC are cameras used by photojournalists Carl Mydans and J. Ross Baughman.<br></p> <p>For additional collections, search collections.si.edu.</p> <p><span class="fontstyle0">Keywords: Leica, Barnack, 35mm, photography, camera<br></span></p> <p><span class="fontstyle0">From the finding aid written by Anthony Brooks:<br>Leica Cameras have a unique position in the history of 35mm film photography. The Leica was not the first still camera taking 35mm film. It was not even the first commercially successful 35mm camera, but it set the gold standard for all other 35mm cameras and turned 35mm cameras from toys into serious professional tools.</span></p> <p><span class="fontstyle0">The 35mm film gauge was first introduced in 1892 by Kodak for use by Thomas Edison to make movie films. Edison quickly settled on a standard frame size (18 x 24mm) with four sprocket holes per frame. This movie standard has remained unchanged. The growth of the movie industry in the early twentieth century required large quantities of 35mm film. 1000 feet of 35mm movie film creates less than 20 minutes of movie images. Soon there was interest in using this film for still photography and after 1910, the first 35mm cameras appeared. Most of the early 35mm camera designs used the single frame 18x24mm format and many used lengths of film capable of taking a hundred or more exposures. The quality of photographs from this small format was often disappointing and the number of exposures was a deterrent to amateur photographers. A contemporary small Kodak vest pocket camera took larger negatives on an eight exposure roll and produced better quality prints. </span>The majority of early 35mm cameras were not commercially successful and are rare today. One exception was the American made Ansco Memo introduced in 1926 that for a few years had a dedicated following. However, the introduction of the Leica 35mm camera was to dramatically change the status of 35mm photography. </p> <p><span class="fontstyle0">The Leica was designed by Oscar Barnack, an employee of the Leitz Optical Company based in Wetzlar, Germany. Barnack may have conceived the first Leica for test exposures in the 18x24mm single frame format. Test exposures were often taken to check the lighting set-up for movies and portraits. However, at some point Barnack decided to design a 35mm camera for photography in its own right. In order to improve<br>image quality Barnack used two single frames and thus the standard 35mm film frame was born. The PHC contains many significant items that represent the history of Leica cameras.</span> </p> <p></p> <p><br></p> <p><br></p> <p></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 a collection of Ippertype samples, a photo mechanical process. The patent was issued to John W. Ippers assignor to Albert Henry, December 30, 1904, patent number 785,735.<br></p> <p>The image Ipper used to demonstrate his process, the Ippertype, was based on an image called <em>Cardinal d'Amboise</em> from 1826 by Nicephore Niepce. <br></p> <p>"Ippertype printing --The object of my invention is to make natural or artificial subjects with graduated deposits of printing-ink in relief-printing, intaglio-printing or planographic printing and by a process which includes photographic means and mechanical means without hand drawing or engraving and without any half tone screen" <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=jZpMAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA3532&ots=Qdsa6AXoZj&dq=ippertype&pg=PA3532#v=onepage&q=ippertype&f=false">https://books.google.com/books...</a><br></p> <p>Keywords: photomechanical, photo mechanical printing<br></p>

<p>This is a small sampling of reels and viewers related to View-Masters that are included in the Photographic History Collection. The objects in the assortment included in the Learning Lab are commercial and personal. <br></p> <p>For additional materials, search collections.si.edu.</p> <p>Keywords: stereo viewers, toy viewers, reels, entertainment</p> <p>View-Masters were introduced in 1939 at the World's Fair by GAF, there are examples of these, a projector used for Sunday School lessons, and equipment used to make personal reels in the Photographic History Collection. </p> <p><br></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>

<p>The Berenice Abbot collection at NMAH Photographic History consists of 16 silver prints ranging in size from 7 1/2” x 9 1/4” to 18 3/4” x 15,” and also includes two tall, narrow prints of Manhattan and a swinging pendulum. The photographs provide a broad survey of the work Abbott produced during her lifetime, from her early portraiture work in Paris and her “Changing New York” series to the “Physics” and “Route 1, U.S.A.” series.’<br></p> <p>Keywords:  women photographer, documentary photography, New York City, street photography, science and photography, portraiture</p> <p>During the 1920s, Berenice Abbott was one of the premier portrait photographers of Paris, her only competitor was the equally well-known Dada Surrealist Man Ray who had served as her mentor and employer before she launched her own career. An American expatriate, Abbott enjoyed the company of some of the great twentieth century writers and artists, photographing individuals such as Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim and James Joyce. One of the critical elements of Abbott’s portraiture was a desire to neither enhance nor interfere with the sitter. She instead wished to allow the personality of her subject to dictate the form of the photograph, and would often sit with her clients for several hours before she even began to photograph them. This straight-forward approach to photography characterized Abbott’s work for the duration of her career. Thematically and technically, Abbott’s work can be most closely linked to documentary photographer Eugène Atget (COLL.PHOTOS.000016), who photographed Paris during the early 1900s. Abbott bought a number of his prints the first time she saw them, and even asked him to set some aside that she planned to purchase when she had enough money. After his death in 1927, Abbott took it upon herself to publicize Atget’s work to garner the recognition it deserved. It was partly for this reason she returned to the United States in 1928, hoping to find an American publisher to produce an English-language survey of Atget’s work. Amazed upon her arrival to see the changes New York had undergone during her stay in Paris, and eager to photograph the emerging new metropolis, Abbott decided to pack up her lucrative Parisian portrait business and move back to New York. The status and prestige she enjoyed in Paris, however, did not carry over to New York. Abbott did not fit in easily with her contemporaries. She was both a woman in a male-dominated field and a documentary photographer in the midst of an American photographic world firmly rooted in Pictorialism. Abbott recalls disliking the work of both photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his then protégé Paul Strand when she first visited their exhibitions in New York. Stieglitz, along with contemporaries such as Ansel Adams and Edward Steichen, tended to romanticize the American landscape and effectively dismissed Abbott’s straight photography as she saw it. Not only was Atget’s work rejected by the Pictorialists, but a series of critical comments she made towards Stieglitz and Pictorialism cost Abbott her professional career as a photographer. Afterwards, she was unable to secure space at galleries, have her work shown at museums or continue the working relationships she had forged with a number of magazine publications. In 1935, the Federal Art Project outfitted Abbott with equipment and a staff to complete her project to photograph New York City. The benefit of a personal staff and the freedom to determine her own subject matter was unique among federally funded artists working at that time. The resulting series of photographs, which she titled <em>Changing New York</em>, represent some of Abbott’s best-known work. Her photographs of New York remain one of the most important twentieth century pictorial records of New York City. Abbott went on to produce a series of photographs for varied topics, including scientific textbooks and American suburbs. When the equipment was insufficient to meet her photographic needs, as in the case of her series of science photographs, she invented the tools she needed to achieve the desired effect. In the course of doing so, Abbott patented a number of useful photographic aids throughout her career including an 8x10 patent camera (patent #2869556) and a photographer’s jacket. Abbott also spent twenty years teaching photography classes at the New School for Social Research alongside such greats as composer Aaron Copland and writer W.E.B. DuBois. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Abbott’s career was the printing of Eugène Atget’s photographs, one of the few instances in which one well-known photographer printed a large number of negatives made by another well-known photographer. The struggle to get Atget’s photographs the recognition they deserved was similar to Abbott’s efforts to chart her own path by bringing documentary photography to the fore in a Pictorialist dominated America. Though she experienced varying levels of rejection and trials in both efforts, her perseverance placed her in the position she now holds as one of the great photographers of the twentieth century.</p>

<h2> The Ansel Adams collection in the Photographic History Collection consists of twenty-five photographs, all printed about 1968. All are gelatin silver, mounted, labeled and signed in ink by the photographer. The photographs include many of his most well-known images. The selection of images was made in collaboration between the collecting curator and Adams. The date range of the collection is 1923-1962.<br></h2> <p>For additional images, search collections.si.edu.</p> <p>Keywords: <em>f</em>-64 group, modernism, straight photography, gelatin silver print, Yosemite National Park, the American West, trees, landscape photography, seascape, portraiture<br></p> <p>The first twelve photographs in the collection were purchased from Adams in December 1968.  The other thirteen photographs were given to the Smithsonian from Adams in December 1968.  </p> <p>Ansel Adams (1902-1984) is one of the most well-known twentieth century photographers. His contributions to the field of photography include his innovation and teaching of the Zone System. The quality of his photographs set the standard by which many straight photographs are judged. </p> <p>The works in the collection were used in a Smithsonian exhibition titled, "American Masters," January 26, 1974-September 1, 1975, in the Hall of Photography, National Museum of American History.  The "American Masters" exhibition included recently acquired work by Adams, Lisette Model, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Minor White, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Jerry Uelsmann, Lee Friedlander, Wynn Bullock, Gyorgy Kepes, Paul Caponigro, and Diane Arbus.  Adams had two previous SI exhibitions, one in 1931, and a traveling exhibition in 1956.  There is no documentation stating whether any of these photographs were used in the exhibitions. </p> <p> </p> <p><br></p>

<p>The J. Ross Baughman collection in the Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History includes some 290 photographs, his Pulitzer prize, five contact sheets, an album, two books, and cameras.  The photographs include various subjects such as his time in the Middle East, an unpublished series entitled <em>Beautified,</em> as well as, prints from Baughman's image assignments for <em>Life</em> magazine during the 1980s , including a story about two gay fathers.<br></p> <p>Some of Baughman's cameras are seen the PHC's Learning Lab collection, <em>Leicas</em>.</p> <p>Objects from Baughman's career and professional experiences can be found in two other National Museum of American History Collections (accessions 2010.0228 and 2010.0229).</p> <p>For additional materials, search collections.si.edu.</p> <p>Keywords: photojournalist, photojournalism, Rhodesia, Pulitzer Prize, undercover work,  journalism, photography and danger, newspapers, print culture, picture magazines, print journalism, freelance photographer, controversy, contemporary politics, international affairs, protest, community activism, AIDS, gay family life, military, mercenaries<br></p> <p><br></p> <p><br></p> <p><br></p> <p><br></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>Murray Becker was one of the key photographers of the Hindenburg disaster, the crash of a Nazi dirigible at Lakehurst, NJ on May 6, 1937. The Murray Becker collection consists predominantly of sixteen silver gelatin prints of the Hindenburg disaster. It also includes an oversized scrapbook of newspaper articles and photos covering the disaster, as well as a well-known photograph of a teary-eyed Lou Gehrig announcing his retirement from baseball.<br></p> <p>Keywords:  Hindenburg disaster, Associated Press, AP, Lou Gehrig, photojournalism, dirigible, flight disaster, photojournalism, media history, iconic photographs, scrapbooking</p> <p>On May 6, 1937 Becker and a score of other photographers, including Sam Shere of the International News Photo (INP) and Charles Hoff of the New York Daily News, appeared for a routine night landing of the Hindenburg. As the dirigible pulled in, lines were dropped from the aircraft so that it could be safely reined in to the ground below. Without warning, an explosion was heard, and the entire aircraft was consumed by flame in about 47 seconds. During those 47 seconds, when other photographers present shot one photograph at the most, Murray Becker quickly took three slides using his 4x5 Speed Graphic camera. The following day pictures of the event were reproduced in thousands of newspapers around the globe.</p> <p>The photographs of the Hindenburg exploding affected newspaper readers in a way that words could not. After those photographs were reproduced across the United States and around the world, many newspaper stories were not considered credible unless they had images to support the stories. Becker went on to produce a photograph of Lou Gehrig announcing his retirement in 1939 for which he also received awards. Becker served as Chief Photographer of the Associated Press for a full thirty-two years before he retired.</p> <p><br></p> <p><br></p>