RG 32. Photographs

Scope and Contents Class albums are photograph albums with portraits of the graduating members of a particular class year at Oberlin College, which sometimes include photographs of faculty members or the president of the College. The date range for these is 1858-1898, but some years are not represented. These albums replace the daguerreotype and ambroytpe group portraits of the preceding two decades as photographers adopted the methods of making multiple prints from wet or dry plate negatives. The...

Scope and Contents Cased images represent the first forms of photographs taken at Oberlin, with the earliest dating from soon after the invention of photography in 1839, and the majority from the 1850s. In the United States, daguerreotypes were the first common expressions of photography. Daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes exist only as single unique images that are not generated from negatives.  These images typically appear in period cases, which protected the cover glass of daguerreotypes and...

Scope and Contents Photographic images of buildings, monuments and places on campus, on paper of legal size and smaller, fill this category; it also includes born digital images.  Nearly all of the buildings represented are college buildings; the exceptions are a few early Oberlin churches. The monuments represented are college-owned, with some exceptions. Places constitute the Arboretum, a large natural area with a reservoir, and Tappan Square, now devoid of buildings but which once served as the site of...

Scope and Contents This grouping, arranged by subject, holds the largest numbers of photographic prints in the Oberlin College Archives. The bulk of them are 8” x 10” or smaller, and are stored vertically in file cabinet drawers. Older, more fragile prints are stored separately in records cartons and require more careful handling. The subject headings were locally derived and do not adhere to any controlled vocabulary. The older prints, dating from the 1850s to the later 1910s, were produced by...

Scope and Contents The Photograph Albums Collection comprises albums or album contents dating from 1861 to 2000. Fifteen of these date from the 19th century, with cartes-de-visite, collotypes, tintypes, cabinet cards, postcards, cyanotypes, and other early prints. Cyanotypes dominate the contents of albums dating from 1900 to 1910, typically taken by Oberlin students themselves. From the 1920s to the 1960s several College-produced albums feature quality gelatin silver prints made...