Images: (left) Eugène Maunoury, Four cartes-de-visite of Peruvian Women, ca. 1863, GRI, 2022.R.15; (center) F.W. Baker, Portrait of a young maharajah, ca. 1850s, GRI, 2022.R.23; (right) Henri Ranoux, Statue de femme, marbre blanc, statue municipale, marbre blanc, statue de l'empereur Antonin,? marbre blanc, ca. 1895, GRI, 90.R.1-10.
Virtually the entire range of photographic processes or mediums and photographic formats, from early daguerreotypes to contemporary digital photographs, can be found within the photographic holdings. Black-and-white photographic processes include unique objects - daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tin types; and photographs made from negatives which enable the creation of multiple prints, including the salted paper, albumen, gelatin silver, collodion, carbon, digital prints, and other processes. Color processes include chromogenic color, dye diffusion transfer (Polaroid and other instant images), silver-dye bleach (Cibachrome), and digital prints. Also represented in the collections are black-and-white photomechanical prints such as collotypes, photogravures, Woodburytypes, and color photomechanical prints such as photochroms.
Photographic formats, that is the way in which the image is presented, include cased objects, loose prints, photograph albums, and card-mounted photographs. Card-mounted photographs collected by the GRI include cartes-de-visite, cabinet cards and similarly sized cards, and stereographs. While these formats can be found throughout the collections, the repository has also assembled collections under two large umbrellas: Expositions and Cities and Sites. The assembled expositions collections comprise carte-de-visite, stereographs, glass stereographs, and postcard collections. In addition to these formats, the Cities and Sites collections also include cabinet card and loose print collections.
In addition to the Expositions and Cities and Sites postcard collections, the GRI holds a variety of discrete postcard collections. The Andreas Brown Collection, amounting to more than 10,300 postcards, is organized around a myriad of aspects of American life and culture in the first half of the twentieth century. A similarly sized collection amassed by the photography collector Samuel Wagstaff, Jr. encompasses erotica, greetings cards, and tourist images. Smaller historical postcard collections comprise those relating to the Paris Commune and the Mexican Revolution. A more specifically pedagogic collection of postcards and personal snapshots belonged to the English art historian and Soviet spy, Anthony Blunt, documents sixteenth-century French Renaissance architecture.
Other stereograph collections of note include the Israel Stollman stereographs collections focusing on world cities and sites, but especially of Europe, and Joseph Cornell’s personal collection of stereographs.
The collection includes a large selection of photography manuals dating from the early 1840s to the late twentieth-century: equipment manuals and product information, how-to guides for amateur photographers, and treatises on photography, not least those authored by pioneers of the medium such as W. H. F. Talbot, Robert Hunt, and Antoine Claudet. Some collections contain more specific documentation, such as the Ronald Ramus Collection of Polaroid Cameras, Film and Related Materials, which holds Polaroid manuals and sample prints.
Finally, other photographic ephemera is scattered across holdings, including samples of photographic supplies, advertising ephemera, portraits of photographic pioneers, notices from photographic clubs and societies, and examples of small photographic formats and other novelties such as photographic playing cards. The Hans Christian Adam Collection contains over 4,000 items of ephemera, mainly advertising cards and invitations, relating to photographic exhibitions, auction houses, and photography publishers in Western Europe during the late twentieth century.