Primary Collection Photographic albums
Photographs by Lewis Carroll at Christ Church, circa 1856
The portraits in the Christ Church album belong to the period in which Dodgson's interest in photography was first awakened. The portraits are, as one would expect from a novice in photography, mainly of his friends and contemporaries at the college, a number of whom went on to become leading figures in the English church. The album belonged to one of these sitters, Canon John Rich, and includes some memorabilia pasted in by his descendants.
The Rejlander album: photographs by Oscar Rejlander, circa 1854-1866
Album bound in gilt and tooled black morocco leather containing seventy-one albumen prints mounted on gilt-edged card pages. The photographs are all by the photographic pioneer, Oscar Gustav Rejlander (c. 1813-75) and include a selection of portraits of identifiable sitters, as well as a number of Rejlander’s well-known figurative, genre photographs.
Gerald Brenan album: photographs by John Hope-Johnstone, circa 1922
An album of photographs mostly of Augustus John, who visited Brenan at Yegen in May 1922. Brenan is believed to have been the original owner of the album.
Photographs from an album by various photographers depicting life at Balmoral, not only showing the castle's royal residents - Queen Victoria and Prince Albert first visited in 1842 and in 1848 acquired the lease on the Balmoral estate - but also those who worked on the estate.
The Carlyle album: photographs attributed to Sir Anthony Coningham Sterling, late 1840s-55
Photographs of Thomas Carlyle, his wife Jane and friends of the Carlyles in the 1850s.
The Hill and Adamson albums: photographs by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, 1843-48
Three albums containing some of the earliest photographs ever taken and the best examples of Hill and Adamson's work. The prints were selected from their collection of 1,500 negatives and arranged in three albums by Hill, on Adamson's untimely death, aged 26, in 1848.
The Watkins album: photographs by Herbert Watkins, late 1850s
A series of photographs of distinguished contemporaries, which Watkins published with printed biographies under the title of National Gallery of Photographic Portraits. The photographer claimed in his advertisements that his photographs were 'as remarkable for their agreeable fidelity to nature as for their brilliancy of production and their economy of cost'.
