Photographs, Carte de Visite etc

The carte-de-visite — a small albumen print mounted on a card approximately the size of a visiting card — was introduced by the French photographer André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri in 1854 and within a decade had transformed portrait photography from an expensive luxury into a mass phenomenon. The multi-lens camera that Disdéri developed allowed eight or more small portraits to be taken on a single glass plate, dramatically reducing the cost of photographic portraiture and making the carte-de-visite accessible to a social range extending from the aristocracy to the skilled working class. By the mid-1860s, the exchange of cartes-de-visite had become a social ritual across the Western world, and the specially designed albums in which they were collected were to be found in the parlours of households from Mayfair to Melbourne.

The celebrity carte-de-visite was among the earliest and most commercially significant applications of the format. Photographs of royalty, politicians, military figures, actors and other public personalities were produced in editions of thousands and sold through stationers and photographic suppliers to a public hungry for the likenesses of the famous. Queen Victoria and her family were among the most extensively photographed subjects of the 1860s, and the cartes-de-visite depicting them circulated in extraordinary quantities across the British Empire. These celebrity cartes are important documents of the visual culture of Victorian celebrity as well as historical records of specific individuals.

The colonial Australian carte-de-visite industry developed rapidly from the early 1860s, as the photographic studios that had established themselves in the major cities during the gold rush era turned to the new format with its larger and more reliable commercial potential. Studios in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and the other colonial capitals produced cartes-de-visite for a clientele that ranged from the colonial establishment to newly prosperous gold rush families eager to document their social arrival in photographic form. These colonial cartes are of particular historical interest, preserving faces and fashions of Australian society at a formative moment in the country’s development.

The cabinet card — a larger format portrait print mounted on a correspondingly larger card backing — was introduced in the 1870s and became the dominant studio portrait format through the 1880s and 1890s, gradually displacing the carte-de-visite for formal portraiture while the smaller format persisted for exchange purposes. The larger scale of the cabinet card allowed for more detailed photographic rendering and more elaborate studio settings, and the finest examples of the format are technically accomplished portraits that reward extended examination.

The social history preserved in anonymous cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards — the faces of people whose names and circumstances are unknown — is of considerable interest to historians of dress, material culture and social identity. The conventions of studio portraiture — the pose, the props, the painted backdrop, the arrangement of clothing — were carefully calculated to present the subject in the most flattering and socially appropriate light, and reading these conventions is itself a form of social historical analysis. The changing fashions of dress that can be dated with some precision from photographic evidence make cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards invaluable resources for historians of Victorian and Edwardian clothing.

For collectors of photographic history, social history or the visual culture of the Victorian era, original cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards offer an accessible and deeply rewarding collecting area. Individual portraits of identified subjects — particularly those with Australian colonial connections — are of particular historical value, and albums containing multiple portraits preserve both the photographic objects and evidence of the social networks within which they circulated.