http://www.photographymuseum.com/histsw.htm
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Carte de Visite
Small albumen prints mounted on cards 2-1/2 by 4 inches. They were wildly popular and made for decades in countries around the world. They were able to let friends and relatives exchange portraits, knowing that they would find a place in the others family album. Carte de Visite's could be sent through the mail without the need for a huge case and fragile cover glass. They were extremely inexpensive and they became so popular that by 1863 Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "Card portraits, as everybody knows, have become the social currency, the 'green-backs' of civilization." They were also used to invite people to social gatherings, having a name engraved and printed on glossy stock. The standard size mentioned up above, was patented by a Parisian photographer, Andre Adolphe Disderi, in 1854. The use of a sliding plate holder and a camera with four lenses, made it easier to have eight negatives that could be taken on a single 8'' x 10'' glass plate. Cartes were introduced in New York, probably by C.D. Fredericks, late in the summer of 1859. The American Civil War gave the format enormous momentum as soldiers and their families posed for cartes before they were seperated by war or death. Queen Victoria created more than a hundred albums of cartes, featuring royalty and others of social prominence. Sales in England ran in the hundereds of millions, annually. Cartes were also made of groups and landscapes and even as pioneering examples of photojournalism.
http://www.photographymuseum.com/histsw.htm
http://www.photographymuseum.com/histsw.htm
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