Steve Weinrebe's Mode Studio

By way of the Vintage Works/iPhotoCentral newsletter, which wrote up the book The Origins of American Photography 1839-1885, by Kieth F. Davis, there is an accompanying exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City which looks worth visiting to soak up the historical perspective that a great collection of early photography, like this, can provide. And if you can’t, the Nelson-Atkins web site features an engaging sampling of the exhibition with an excellent, Zoomify-type, web viewer that allows you to zoom in and navigate the images with excellent, high-res, clarity. Click on a link to the collection here, click again on the image thumbnail to bring up a detail page about the image, then click the thumbnail on that page to bring up the viewer. So now there’s no excuse for not checking out the Civil War photography, the images by Southworth and Hawes, McDonnel’s Indian Chief daguerreotype, and the early work on different mediums that characterized this key period in both American history and the history of photography. The exhibition runs until December 30th.

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