President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation two and a half years before all enslaved people in Confederate territory were told they were free. Juneteenth, a combination of "June" ...

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery announced today that it has acquired the earliest known photograph of a U.S. First Lady for its permanent collection. Likely dating from 1846, the recently ...

A new exhibition at the crossroads of art, history and technology chronicles the beginnings of early American photography. Titled “The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910,” the show at the ...

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) was photography’s first widely recognized artist, making images in a signature soft focus style that remains captivating to this day. Before it was an art, ...

ANTHREF copy 39088010703403 has bookplate: Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Purchased from the Lloyd and Charlotte Wineland Library Endowment for Native American and Western Exploration Literature.

The relationship between photography and modern medicine is akin to siblings: emerging almost simultaneously in the 19th century, they grew and evolved together, and today, they are more inseparable ...

The Tennessee State Museum’s latest temporary exhibition, "Photography in Tennessee: Early Studios and the Medium’s First Century," opens June 10. The show explores the origins and impact of ...

One of the first photographs on display in Photography in Tennessee, on view through Nov. 9 at the Tennessee State Museum, is a portrait of a little girl named Lucy. She’s about 9 in the ambrotype, ...

Early photography lacked the convenience of the stable roll film we all know, and instead relied on a set of processes which the photographer would have to master from film to final print.