By the 1860s, portraits of the celebrated were widespread and the mass-production of cartes-de-visite--inexpensive paper prints glued onto 2 x 3 inch cardboards and used as visual calling cards--triggered a collecting frenzy. Images of international notables--from Queen Victoria to the Sultan of Persia, and from Horatio Alger to Friedrich Nietzsche--and of local beauties and outrageous entertainers were sold by vendors in studios, shops, and on street corners. No matter how large or small the accomplishment of the person depicted, each picture was the same size. The democratic nature of photography, however, had its limits. Some of the famed and the celebrated sat merely to get a photographic likeness of themselves, for the novelty of being photographed or for the honor it conferred. Other sitters demanded, and received, sitting fees and royalties from the sale of their images. So great was the public's fascination with certain personalities that hundreds of thousands of cartes of a single image might be sold in a few months. As the cost of portraits dropped, the cartes of the famous that were passionately collected found their places in ornate albums, side-by-side with cartes of family members, and provided information as well as hours of entertainment. In the late 1860s, when the public became bored with the carte-de-visite format, sales dropped and photographers and publishers in the burgeoning business of photography rushed to market new kinds of images documenting a broader range of cultural figures and performers, in varying formats and sizes. Images of celebrated actors and actresses, businessmen, clergymen, and political leaders were glued onto larger pieces of card stock or onto loose newsprint sheets that were sold individually or in weekly installments, bound into portfolios or together in books, glued onto posters, handbills, and leaflets. By the 1870s, when advances in photographic technology allowed for shorter sittings and less controlled studio situations, portraits started to look more spontaneous. Pictures of the famous became less formal and serious, and more animated and theatrical in their iconography. The facial expressions and dramatic gestures and poses of subjects like Sarah Bernhardt and the formerly camera-shy members of high society are evidence of how quickly subjects and photographers learned to collaborate on capturing the perfect "performance" that would resonate for posterity. The public, too, was thrilled with the artificiality, high drama, and nuances of celebrity portraiture, and their enthusiasm continued to swell when 3-D stereopticon (stereoscope) photographs became the craze. By the closing years of the nineteenth century, after cameras for amateurs became more widely available in the 1880s, people knew exactly what to do when it was their turn to take and pose for the first snapshot images.

Photographer unknown. Front cover of Success magazine, featuring Thomas Edison. February 1898. Offset lithograph, 14 1/4 x 10 5/8" (36.2 x 27 cm). Courtesy Richard S. West/Periodyssey   select image for enlarged view

 

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©1999 The Museum of Modern Art, New York