Introduction

People were by far the most common photographic subject of the 19th century. Photographic portraits were much less expensive than painted ones, took less of the sitter’s time, and described individual faces with uncanny accuracy. So great was the sense of presence in these pictures that photographers were often called on to take portraits of the recently deceased, a genre now known as postmortem portraits. Miniature painters, who had previously supplied the least expensive form of portraiture, quickly went out of business or became daguerreotypists themselves.

Interest in daguerreotypes dwindled in Europe after 1851, when English photographer Frederick Scott Archer invented the collodion, or wet-plate process. Like Talbot’s calotype, this was a negative-to-positive process, but because the negatives were made of smooth glass rather than paper, the collodion process produced much sharper images. Glass was also more durable than paper, so it was easier to produce many paper prints from one glass negative.

Using the collodion method, French painter and photographer Adolphe Disdéri in 1854 invented the carte-de-visite, a form of photographic calling card, which soon became the new rage. Taken with a special camera that produced eight poses on one negative, the carte-de-visite—and its larger sibling, the cabinet card—created a market for celebrity photographs in France and England. Cartes, as they are known, were both traded and collected; they served to connect royalty with commoners, actors with their audiences, and old society with the newly prosperous.

In the United States, the carte-de-visite played second fiddle to ever-cheaper variations on the daguerreotype theme. The first of these, the ambrotype, was nothing more than a glass negative backed with black material, which enabled it to appear as a positive image. Patented in 1854, the ambrotype was made, packaged, and sold in portrait studios as the daguerreotype had been, but at a lower cost. Even less expensive was the tintype, patented two years later, which substituted an iron plate for glass. During the American Civil War (1861-1865) tintypes were the most readily available form of location portraiture. Tintype photographers often worked from the back of horse-drawn wagons, photographing pioneer families and Union soldiers.