Carte de visite

The carte-de-visite provided a wet collodion negative from which could be made multiple prints, in a standardised format, with cheaper materials, thus permitting production on an industrial scale.

It seems that in the big cities, such as Paris, London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, these cartes de visite are widely used, so the device we saw at M. Hermagis' enjoys considerable success.

Nevertheless, the development of the solar camera enabled enlargements of cartes up to life-size, often hand-coloured and retouched so that they rivalled the painted portrait, and could be framed and displayed.

Earlier that year he exhibited a number of life-size portrait enlargements from carte de visite negatives at the 1862 World Fair, which were praised as 'magnificent' and 'without distortion'.

In Germany, Emperor Wilhelm I encouraged this pictorial culture by investing approximately 120 studios with the imprimatur of Hofphotograph (court photographer), based on the cartes that each had made of the kaiser, flatteringly posed with his gloved right fist planted powerfully on a table bearing his plumed helmet, and of his family.

Hurrychind Chintamon was a successful early Indian photographers who made carte-de visite portraits of literary, political, and business figures, the most famous of which was of the Maharaja of Baroda, thousands of which were circulated.

[18] Other Chinese photo studios producing cartes de visite in the 1890s include those of Kung Tai (公泰照相樓)[citation needed] and Sze Yuen Ming (上洋耀華照相) in Shanghai,[19][20] and Pun Lun (繽綸) in Hong Kong.

The carte de visite was introduced in New York, probably by Charles DeForest Fredricks, late in the summer of 1859 and proved immediately popular in the era of the Civil War.

[23] As The Times of London reported on August 30, 1862:America swarms with the members of the mighty tribe of cameristas, and the civil war has developed their business in the same way that it has given an impetus to the manufacturers of metallic air-tight coffins and embalmers of the dead.

The young Volunteer rushes off at once to the studio when he puts on his uniform, and the soldier of a year's campaign sends home his likeness that the absent ones may see what changes have been produced in him by war's alarms.

Washington has burst out into signboards of ambrotypists and collodionists, and the "professors" of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia send their representatives to pick up whatever is left, and to follow the camps as well as they can.

Portuguese-born Cristiano Júnior in Argentina,[28] and German-born Alberto Henschel[29] and Italian-born photographer Auguste Stahl in Brazil,[30] made carte de visite pictures of “racial types” in the anthropometric genre—standardised poses of naked or semi-naked bodies—of slaves and freed people.

The tapada was the most widespread “tipo de antano” or a sentimental, nostalgic stereotype of traditional stock characters from times gone by, a symbol of the lost colonial Lima.

In Australia Manchester-born William Davies began his photographic career with Walter Woodbury (inventor of the Woodburytype) and established several studios in Melbourne from 1858.

[35] William Davies and Co at 98 Bourke St., being opposite the Theatre Royal, sold cartes de visite of famous actors, actresses and opera singers.

"[37] Now regarded as an early manifestation of "social media",[38][2] cartes-de-visite were an adjunct to letter-writing; unlike the fragile daguerreotypes which preceded them and which also were used predominantly for portraits, they could be posted in regular manufactured envelopes which had become available only ten years before.

Their value to him was demonstrated in his response to their gift of an album by Dutch naturalists containing 217 carte de visites; "...for the few remaining years of my life, whenever I want cheering, I will look at the portraits of my distinguish co-workers in the field of science, and remember their generous sympathy.

Nevertheless, while larger framed prints became available at photography studios, the two smaller formats were the main trade of professional portrait photographers even between 1888, when George Eastman introduced the mass produced and pre-loaded Kodak which industrialised the processing and printing of amateurs' photographs,[45] and 1900, when the Brownie camera simplified the technology and so reduced the cost of the medium that snapshot photography became a mass phenomenon.