Printing Press — photography

Between 2400 BCE and 300 CE, Nubian kings and queens controlled vast empires and trade networks, rivalling—and even for a brief time conquering—their more famous neighbors, the Egyptians. The MFA’s exhibition, Ancient Nubia Now, features more than 400 archaeological highlights gathered from its excavations of various Nubian sites between 1910 and 1930. Extensive photography was completed at the time to document the work and historical objects, but now those photos can stand on their own as artwork. As stated in this month’s blog post, selections from an essay by curator Lawrence M. Berman, “Showing the best of these images complete, outside their original strictly documentary context, brings the settings in which they were made to life and reveals the artistry of their makers.”

One of the earliest photographic processes is the cyanotype, which produces a unique, blue-tinted print and was invented in 1842 by Sir John Herschel. Explore the history of this art form through pioneers of the technique in a feature written by Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs, Anne E. Havinga.

MFA Prints is often a hard service to explain simply. So, to explore vast histories of artwork, dive further into collections of the MFA's exhibitions, and to help explain the process behind our archival replica prints, we set up a blog and have a new video.