With any new and exclusive technology, there inevitably comes the moment when it is seized upon by the masses and it becomes ordinary and everyday. For photography, that moment came in the late 1850s with the advent of the carte de visite (visiting card).
Since the 1700s, the social elite had shared calling cards, but in 1854 the idea of using a small photograph was patented by the Parisian photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri. It started a fad that lasted only a decade, which has been investigated in great depth in Paul Frecker’s Cartomania.
Cartomania is well worth a read if you’re interested in early photography. With an excellent collection of images, it covers the full range of photographic topics, both academically and anecdotally, making it a study of both the medium and the lives of Victorians.
Here’s a few takeaways from it…
Carte de visite albums were the social media of their day. Albums were made up of photos of friends and family, celebrities and topics of interest. The album could serve to demonstrate your social standing, but also provide an opportunity to laugh at a funny cat.
Henry Pointer of Brighton
Middle: Unidentified sitters – Photographer and locaation unidentified
Right: Unidentified sitters – Miss Rosenthal of London
Middle: An unidentified child and a ‘hidden mother’ – Photographer unidentified
RIght: An unidentified sitter – Mrs Bustin & Sons of Hereford
As well as poring over the appearance of the rich and famous, you could marvel at the poor and the foreign, their realities portrayed with plenty of quaintness but none of the grime.
Middle: Natives of Kerry – Sedgefield’s Irish Scenery, pub. by A. W. Bennett
Right: Cornish fisherwoman
Hundreds of thousands of people were working as photographers by 1860, not all of them talented and photography studios popped up anywhere and everywhere. With any success story comes the opportunity to make a quick buck and in the absence of copyright law (unless an agreement was specifically made), a photo could be reproduced without the permission of its subject, and on the opposite end, a sitter could take their top price photo to a cheaper studio for inexpensive reproductions.
Many celebrities were photographed and their cards were sold widely. One of these celebrities was a child acrobat Samuel Wasgatt, who performed alongside his father as El Niño Farani. As a teenager, Samuel grew his hair and enjoyed even greater success as Mademoiselle Lulu. What makes this story interesting, is that the press were so enamoured with Lulu’s graceful appearance, that for some time they were convinced that Samuel was a woman who’d previously masqueraded as a boy.
Middle: El Niño Farini – Adolphe Naudin of London
Right: Mademoiselle Lulu – The London Stereoscopic and Photographic Co.
Middle: Mrs Emma Brandreth – C. Norman of Biggleswade
Right: A ‘spirit’ photograph – William Mumler of Boston, Massachusetts
In an age of high mortality, when tending to the dead took place in the home, by the family, photographing a departed love one was not as strange as it would be to us today. Portraits were sat for by those about to die, those recently dead (sad images of ‘sleeping’ babies with a favourite toy, sometimes held by their grieving mother), and those mourning the dead. Photographers were also able to sieze upon the trend for communicating with the spirit world by selling spirit shots to a public unfamiliar with the tricks of the trade.
Cartomania: Photography and Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century
Paul Frecker
2014
September publishing.
