ABSTRACT
Many early daguerreotype portraits have an endearingly primitive quality, generated as much by slow exposure times, unsophisticated technology, and impromptu studio settings as by photographers and clientele still not quite sure how one should properly pose in front of a camera. The pose and setting again gesture back to an established aristocratic painted portrait tradition, but the picture's obvious artifice-the clear shift in visual register between the sitter and the backdrop-implies that, having been superseded, such codes were now available for the plundering. Photography had turned class into a visual commodity, into a set of poses and appearances-into an act. Suitably inspired, a customer could act out, within a standard format, a number of different poses and then choose the one he or she preferred. More accurately, the authorship of carte portraits came to be a fluid affair in which both photographer and subject had an active part.
