ABSTRACT
The typical carte-de-visite photograph, with its self-consciously bourgeois subject leaning on a fake column or pretending to read at a small table, is habitually regarded as being entirely without imagination. Repetitive and predictable, popular and unabashedly commercial, these small pictures have been denigrated as ‘mechanical and routine’ by photography’s historians. Beaumont Newhall, for example, says they have ‘little aesthetic value’ even if, ‘as documents of an era, they are often of great charm and interest’ (Newhall 1982: 64-6). Mary Warner Marien’s 2001 survey history devotes barely a column to the carte-de-visite as a genre, claiming not to be able to understand its appeal or success (2002: 84-5). Faced with what another scholar has called their ‘conformist tyranny’ (Sagne 1998: 114), Naomi Rosenblum, in her World History, concludes that ‘carte portraits oered little compass for an imaginative approach to pose and lighting as a means of evoking character’ (1997: 63). It is certainly true that cartes were made in their homogenized millions by a multitude of hack photographers. But they were also made by many of the more prominently creative names in the history of photography, including Hippolyte Bayard, Antoine Claudet, Southworth and Hawes, Gustave Le Gray, Camille Silvy, Samuel Bourne, Marc Ferrez, Etienne Carjat, Nadar, Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Carleton Watkins, Oscar Rejlander, Charles Dodgson, Clementina Hawarden, Julia Margaret Cameron and Henry Peach Robinson. Are we to assume that the aesthetic limitations of the format were such that none of these canonical photographers were able to overcome them and produce imaginative images? Or could it be that the search for imagination in the carte-de-visite must be directed elsewhere, away from the usual focus on photographer and subject, and instead onto the mind’s eye of their viewers?
