First Seen Portraits of the World's Peoples, 1840-1880

Published to coincide with a traveling exhibition from one of the world's finest private collections - the Wilson Centre for Photography in London, First Seen is an extraordinary collection of some 250 of the earliest photographs ever taken during the nineteenth-century. Beautifully reproduced in a four colour process, a number of photographers have set out to capture the world's peoples and a variety of races and classes, from intimate domestic portraits to studies of the different, the exotic, the picturesque and the never-before-encountered. The fourth in a series of books published in association with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art to explore nineteenth-century photography, this is an amazing memento of the time images were first shown on paper. "... a beautiful, enticing and problematic book..." History of Photography