Photographica

Among the treasures in the Schlesinger Library are photograph collections that document the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s: images by Bettye Lane and Freda Leinwand, both of whom spent years capturing the moments, both big and small, that made up one of the most transformative times in U.S. history.

Introduced by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre in 1839, the daguerreotype was the first publicly announced photographic process. This digital collection provides access to over 3,500 daguerreotypes in libraries, museums, and archives across Harvard.

This is a virtual collection of more than 40 souvenir photograph albums and illustrated publications with over 2,000 images from Widener Library, the Fine Arts Library, and Harvard-Yenching Library. These images primarily document the early history of commercial photography in Japan and are representative of what is often called Japanese tourist photography or Yokohama shashin. They reflect the Western image of traditional Japanese culture before the dramatic transformation brought about by modernization during the Meiji period (1868-1912).

Discover the history and science of early photography through a collection of photographs and other materials.

Harvard’s History of Photography Timeline offers a view into the history of photography through selected photographs in the University’s libraries, museums, and archives. Harvard holds nearly 10 million photographs that have served as primary source documents for teaching and research in the sciences and humanities since the mid-nineteenth century. The timeline highlights the strengths of Harvard’s collections, which document an encyclopedic range of subjects and include the work of noted nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographers.

The Harvard-Yenching Library holds some 5,000 photographs and 10,000 negatives taken by Hedda Hammer Morrison (1908–1991) while resident in Beijing from 1933 to 1946. The photographs, mounted in thematic albums prepared by Mrs. Morrison, and the negatives, were bequeathed to the Harvard-Yenching Library, "the best permanent home for her vision of a city and people that she loved [Alastair Morrison]."

Salt prints represent the first negative-to-positive photographic technique. Introduced by Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839, it is the process from which most nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographic formats were derived. Collections of salt prints found in libraries, archives, and museums at Harvard University include some of the earliest photographic images created, and they represent a seminal chapter in the history of photography. Together, these holdings reveal technological developments in the medium and pioneering uses of photography across the sciences and humanities.