Tag: photography

Natural Light on Natural History: Rosamond Purcell’s Notes on Photographing Artifacts for A Glorious Enterprise

The process of recording what something ‘looks like’ may be cursory or obsessive. To see, after all, is not only to glance at or even to gaze, at something, but to study and entertain ideas that occur in the presence of those things. The thoughts inform the outcome. The camera shifts an inch and the image takes on new meaning, but seeing properly is progressive and takes time.

A Glorious Enterprise–Now Available

A Glorious Enterprise: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science Robert McCracken Peck and Patricia Tyson Stroud. Photographs by Rosamond Purcell 464 pages |… READ MORE

Two New Exhibits, Two New Books

This weekend, two new exhibits feature artwork connected to new and forthcoming Penn Press books. A Singular View—The Art and Words of John Paton Davies, Jr. opens Saturday, March 3… READ MORE

Douglass and the Daguerreotype–a Guest Post by Marcy J. Dinius

In time, Douglass became so interested in the connection between the visual arts, imagination, humanity, and progress toward liberty and justice that he wrote and delivered a set of lectures on the subject between 1861 and 1865. He began both the earlier and the later versions of his “Lecture on Pictures” with an extended consideration of the daguerreotype. After being daguerreotyped multiple times in the 1840s and 1850s, the former slave had become a man in his daguerreian portrait. His lectures suggest that if his audiences were to look at his or any other African American’s image and reflect on its likeness to their own, the daguerreotype would show them the reality of blacks’ humanity and awaken them to their own.