upcoming exhibition

More than 20 images from the RISD Museum’s collection of rare and seldom seen 19th-century photographs investigate a range of themes-from majestic natural wonders to documents of the urban poor-all captured before the invention of hand-held cameras.

Photography emerged almost simultaneously in France and England in the late 1830s, and its first century saw intensive experimentation with image capture, printing techniques, and camera design. A boom in photographic portraiture produced untold numbers of cartes de visite, daguerreotypes, tintypes, and other short-lived formats made as keepsakes and family heirlooms. Photographic documentation developed into more of an art form as aesthetic considerations were brought to subjects as diverse as Adolphe Braun’s designs for textiles and Julia Margaret Cameron’s allegorical portraits, with results ranging from strikingly sharp views to softly focused and deeply soulful forays into mood and spirituality.