Keyword: History
Heliograph, Calotype, Talbotype, Daguerreotype: these are some of the early names that circulated prior to the word “photograph” during the early, experimental stages of its invention. This fascinating historical text from the mid-1800s lays out the early development of photography from a point in time when the technology had advanced,… Read more »
The ancient Roman-Greek mnemonic technique ‘method of loci’ involves placing information within a spatial structure to create visual associations that can be easily recalled. 19th-century American educator, women’s rights activist and cartographer, Emma Willard, enthusiastically embraced these ‘memory palaces’ as a didactic method, creating several with the intent to form… Read more »
Forced to leave Italy due to his political activity, artist Pietro Marubi sought refuge in the town of Shkodër, Albania, where in 1856 he founded the first photographic atelier of the country. The hundreds of thousands of photographs produced by Marubi and his sons over the decades became the property… Read more »
The city of London appears as one of the marvels featured in Wonderful Things, an English 1852 publication collecting the “the most remarkable Wonders of the Ancient and Modern World”. Created by journalist and chartist Robert Kemp Philp, the piece is a curated text which combines the author’s reflections with… Read more »
This October and November we inaugurate our new section “Past Present Archive” with two pieces from a not-too-distant past. The first below looks at one of the most iconic buildings in Europe: the Colosseum. In the second half of the 18th century, French jurist Jean-Baptiste Mercier Dupaty described his travels… Read more »
In West Africa, mnemonic landscapes have been affected by various political and economic inputs, which in many cases have packaged history into a tourist attraction. The monument becomes the locus of a superimposition of local and global narratives. In this comparative field-research of historic and commemorative sites within the area, Sarah… Read more »
The seabed of the Venetian lagoon teems with thousands of bygone objects. The search for the legendary third column of St. Mark, which is thought to lie in these murky depths, is an opportunity to return their shadows to the surface.