Look Again: Discovering Historical Photos

This traveling exhibit originally produced by the North Carolina Museum of History in Raliegh. This exhibition discusses how the introduction of photography in the mid-1800s forever changed the way we record and remember our personal lives, as well as our community’s, state’s and nation’s history. Some images in Look Again show changes over time—in fashion, architecture, landscapes, technology, and society. Other images show faces, some well-know, others known not at all.

The large-scale reprints in the exhibit represent a variety of photographic processes, dating from the mid-1800s through the 1970s. Some of the original images were nineteenth-century daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes. Others were first printed from turn-of-the-twentieth century glass-plate negatives. Many were taken on black-and-white roll film of the early 1900s while still others were captured on the new color film of the 1950s and later.

The photographs in Look Again are divided into four thematic sections: Telling Stories, Taking a Closer Look, Remembering Faces, and Capturing Moments. Each section focuses on stories and interesting details associated with each individual photo.