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CENTURY
Many of the traits we associate with our sel2es were also present in the most popular
photographic format of the 1860s, the carte de visite.
ICP PERSPECTIVE
Aug 27, 2015
Figure 1: Page from the Westmorland carte de visite album, c. 1864. J. Paul Getty Museum. Object number 84.XD.1283.
Victoria and family, but the enormous public demand for these images of
public 8gures led photography studios to make use of this new method in
order to sell ordinary people photographs of themselves. The strategy
proved remarkably effective: people crowded the studios to get portraits
taken, which they then distributed to friends, family, and distant
acquaintances. Recipients arranged their carte collections in albums,
which they could then page through at their leisure or show off to friends
(Figure 1).
In an 1863 article in the Atlantic, entitled "Doings of the Sunbeam," Oliver
Wendell Holmes addressed the recent popularity of the carte de visite,
saying, "Card-portraitsas everybody knows, have become the social
currency, the sentimental 'Green-backs' of civilization."4
Holmess quotation is revealing for a few reasons. First, it underscores
the cartes sheer ubiquity. In England alone, 300 to 400 million cartes
were sold every year from 1861 to 1867, a stunning 8gure considering
that England's population during these years hovered around 20 million.5
It would not be a stretch to say that with the rise of the carte de visite,
the photograph became a true mass medium, capturing the likenesses
of not just a privileged elite but large swaths of the middle class, and
existing in previously unimaginable quantities.
Second, Holmess designation of the carte as a "currency" is suggestive
of the commodity status of the carte. Cartes almost always bore the
insignia of the commercial studio that produced them, sometimes on the
front of the carte and almost always on the reverseand often this
marker of the commodity status of the carte was large and elaborate
(Figure 2). So while the carte was an object that was meant to represent
the likeness of the individual it pictured, it was also an advertisement for
the studio that had produced it. This intimate commingling of individual
subjecthood with commercial inNuence in the form of advertisements is a
central feature of the social media of the 21st century, where
advertisements are a constant and sometimes discom8ting presence on
personal pro8les.
Third, Holmes' quotation, with its implications of public circulation, gets
at the fact that cartes de visite were objects that were exchanged among
people, accumulating meaning through their dissemination. The
assumption of distribution that was an inbuilt feature of the carte
informed the ways people presented themselves before the camera.
Cartes de visite were akin to currency in that they were intended to be
traded relatively indiscriminately, and they stood in for their bearer in
the same way irrespective of who was on the other end of the
exchange: both objects were treated as static representations of
something that was unstable, whether that something was pecuniary
value or personal identity.
Cartes, then, tended to present a generalized kind of selfhood, a socially
sanctioned and standardized mode of self-presentation.
Figure 2: Verso of a carte de visite by G.W. Pach of New York, c. 1859-1890. Boston Public
Library, accession number 13_05_000847.
Figure 3: Daguerreotype portrait of unidenti8ed man by Southworth & Hawes, c. 1850. International Center of Photography.
offering a sustained, detailed limning of the face (Figure 3). But cartes de
visite demanded a different tack. In their cartes, sitters began to don
fashionable clothing, stood in front of ornate backdrops, and assumed
poses that connoted the sort of attitude they wanted the world to see.
(Figure 4). Photography studios helped to perpetuate these conventions,
by providing people sitting in their waiting rooms with instructions on how
to pose and decorating their studios with examples of successful images.
People were thus guided toward appropriate modes of self-presentation
in their photographs through cues from other ones. People critical of
these standardized, middle-class modes of self-presentation often
mocked the sameness and conventionality of the images, which were
sometimes visually similar to the point of being almost identical. This
sort of complaint about the clichd poses of carte de visite sitters came
to be pervasive in photography journals, and it bears resemblance to
present-day laments about duckface and other visual conventions of
sel8es. But given the purpose of these images, such critiques seem to
miss the mark. The carte de visite was less about individualism and
uniqueness than it was about engaging in a shared social ritual, and the
same could be argued of sel8es in the age of digital media.8
Alice Marwick has referred to the dynamic of self-presentation that one
encounters in social networking applications as social surveillance,
saying, "Technically mediated communities are characterized by both
watching and a high awareness of being watched."9 The awareness of
being watched is an inbuilt feature of virtually all portrait photography,
most of which is predicated on the adoption of a certain pose with the
anticipation of being captured by the camera. But this deep concern for
how one comes offthis intensely self-conscious self-presentationwas
a particularly powerful motivator for subjects of the carte de visite, with
the anticipation of public dissemination informing the ways sitters
arrayed themselves before the camera.
Figure 4: Carte de visite portrait of unidenti8ed woman by W. R. Phipps, c. 1870s-1890s. International Center of Photography.
Figure 5: Carte de visite portrait of Sojourner Truth, 1864. International Center of Photography.
Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (MIT Press, 2006).
4. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Doings of the Sunbeam, Soundings from the Atlantic (Boston:
Ticknor and Fields, 1864), 255.
and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, ed. Maurice O.
Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith (Duke University Press, 2012), 88-89.
11. Deborah Willis, Representing the New Negro, African American Vernacular Photography:
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