This guide is not intended as a comprehensive review of all of UTRGV's Special Collections & Archives photographic collections, content, and formats, but rather it will serve as an initial access point for research into early photographic formats and processes. We hope it will be useful to our users, especially students, patrons, and researchers, who are interested in the history and evolution of photography.
Each tab, or page, represents an image type found within our photographic collections and includes a brief history of the image type ("Historical Context") and a list of our collections containing representative image types (and the boxes in which those images are found). Links to digitized collections of that particular image type are also provided whenever available. Please note that not all images referenced for each type have been digitized; many of the images referenced in this guide must be viewed in person in the UTRGV Special Collections and Archives Reading Rooms (Brownsville or Edinburg).
Image types included in the guide are roughly grouped chronologically. Dates listed for each image type are the years during which that particular format / process was widely available, and in common use.
UTRGV Special Collections & Archives wish to gratefully acknowledge Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections and Archives Research Center (SCARC) and especially, Rachel Lilley, the original author of "Early Photographic Formats and Processes in the Special Collections and Archives Research Center" from which this guide has been adapted. Rachel's original guide not only inspired us to create this resource, but to also reconsider how we approach our photographic collections more generally.
Rachel notes that Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler and Diane Vogt-O'Connor's book Photographs : Archival Care and Management was an invaluable resource in writing her original guide as well as History of Photography, by Beaumont Newhall.
Photographs by
"Photographs: Archival Care and Management is a how-to manual about the preservation
and use of photographs in archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage
organizations.1 Such archival repositories vary widely in size and subject focus, but also
share many common needs. Archival repositories preserve treasured images that have
powerful impacts. They also contain masses of photographs that rely on association
with related images or textual records to convey information and provide evidence. This
manual seeks to improve the management of collections containing visual materials by
focusing on photographs that have enduring documentary value as historical resource
materials for research, publication, exhibition, and teaching. Images appreciated chiefly
as fine art objects are largely outside the books scope."
The History of Photography by
Since its first publication in 1937, this lucid and scholarly chronicle of the history of photography has been hailed as the classic work on the subject. No other book has managed to relate the aesthetic evolution and technical innovations of photography with such an absorbing combination of clarity, scholarship and enthusiasm. For this fifth edition the entire volume has been completely revised and expanded, and over half of the photographs have been newly selected. Through more than 300 works by such master photographers asWilliam Henry Fox Talbot, Timothy O'Sullivan, Julia Margaret Cameron, Peter Henry Emerson, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange,Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, Brassaï, Henri Cartier- Bresson, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, the author presents a fascinating, comprehensive study of the significant trends and developments in the medium since the first photographs were made 1839. New selections added to this fifth edition include photographs made in colour, from handtinted daguerreotypes to autochromes by Steichen to works by such contemporary masters as Eliot Porter, Ernst Haas,William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz.