The wife of the Victorian photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot called his first cameras ‘mousetraps’: little wooden boxes that were designed to capture anything placed before them. Yet most of Fox Talbot’s earliest photographs do not show living bodies at all. Long exposure times meant that the faintest twitch on a sitter’s face would dissolve it into a foggy blur, so instead he trained his lens on objects like shells and books, creating whole new collections he could reproduce in ghostly black and white.
Preserving the images of dead children in an album, like dried flowers, meant that they could remain little forever
Within a few years numerous other photography enthusiasts would follow his lead. In the 18th century, a tourist might return from their travels with a sculpture or a painting; now they came home with photographs. Instead of bringing back a view of Venice by Canaletto, they could produce a hundred of their own; instead of the Elgin Marbles, they could display the entire Acropolis and perch it on their mantelpiece. And once the technology had improved, so that it required seconds rather than minutes to capture a human likeness on film, it was possible to collect people as well. Friends, family members, local dignitaries, religious leaders, pornographic models, celebrities: all could be shrunk to images a few inches high and pasted into an album. It was a Lilliputian world brought to life.
One of the biggest innovations was the carte de visite, a small photograph that was roughly the same size as a traditional visiting card (hence the name) and was created through a new process that could generate up to ten images on each glass negative. After they had been printed on specially prepared paper, cut up into individual photographs and pasted on card mounts, they could be sold for a fraction of the cost of earlier photographic portraits: around 1s 6d for a standard print, or the same price as a pack of playing cards. The result was a craze known as cartomania, that in the first half of the 1860s swept Britain. As Paul Frecker explains in this eye-opening and frequently jaw-dropping history of the phenomenon, it was ‘a perfect storm of merchandising, consumerism and social display’, and reading his account of its rise and fall, accompanied by hundreds of images from Frecker’s own collection, opens up a set of fascinating peepholes on to a now vanished world.
In Britain the craze was boosted by Queen Victoria’s willingness to let her image be distributed in carte format (she also compiled 32 albums of her own), which allowed her subjects to feel they were being granted intimate access to her even when she remained out of view, still grimly mourning the death of Prince Albert. Middle-class consumers were keen to follow her lead, and soon hundreds of new photography studios (there were 35 on London’s Regent Street alone) sprang up to satisfy their demands, even if the recycling of similar props and poses – here a fake stone balustrade to lean on, there a leather-covered volume to pretend to read – meant that what was produced was often completely predictable.
Actually for some sitters that was the whole point of the exercise. As Kierkegaard wryly noted a few years earlier, when ‘everyone will be able to have their portrait taken’, so much will be done to make them look exactly the same that ‘soon we shall only need one portrait’. It was an early warning of a phenomenon that is perhaps now more familiar through the filtered and photoshopped pouts of selfies. The carte de visite wasn’t a revelation of the sitter’s uniqueness. It was a badge of belonging.
But cartomania was the result of more than just the desire among middle-class Victorians to project a respectable image of themselves. They could also collect photographs of other people and paste them into an album, creating what Frecker describes as ‘imagined communities’ of many different kinds. Like a butterfly collector storing specimens in a glass case, or a child playing with a doll’s house, a photograph album offered the viewer a neat miniature of a much larger and more chaotic reality.
Frecker follows a similar logic, by dividing his book into thematic chapters that try to retrieve some common patterns from the millions of cartes that were produced when the craze was at its height. A chapter on ‘Sensations’ describes the popularity of photographs depicting entertainers such as Blondin, whose performances at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham involved him crossing a tightrope on stilts, or when blindfolded, or with his feet in buckets. Another, on ‘Armchair Travellers’, shows how viewers treated cartes as windows on to foreign lands, from apple-cheeked milkmaids in Belgium to the images sent back from Java in 1861 by a British photographer named Walter Woodbury, who phlegmatically reported that his diet there, including peacock steaks and bat legs, was somewhat different to the one he was used to in his native Manchester. There are also little clutches of images that reveal some photographic fashions that have simply been forgotten, including a vogue for photographing the back of a sitter’s head, which Frecker speculates may have been intended to supply a joke when someone turned the pages of an album.
Perhaps the images that are strangest to modern eyes are those depicting children who had recently died, often accompanied by their stony-faced parents. It is in the nature of photography to be, as Susan Sontag once put it, ‘an elegiac art… a twilight art’, because by creating a stutter in the relentless drift of time the camera also brings to mind the passage of time. But dead children were especially rewarding subjects for photography, and not just because, unlike living children, they didn’t whine and fidget. (Frecker tells the story of one photographer, sent to photograph a dead body, who ‘had left his camera plate exposed and gone to lunch’.) At a time of high infant mortality, photographing them could console adult viewers with the thought that those children would be spared the corruption of grown-up life – the sort of thinking that had earlier led Dickens to kill off Little Nell in his novel The Old Curiosity Shop while she was still ‘fresh from the hand of God’. Preserving the images of little children in an album, like dried flowers, meant that they could remain little forever.
But Frecker’s book saves its best for last, by subjecting a handful of cartes to some detective work and revealing the stories behind them. We meet Edith O’Gorman, who was billed as ‘The Escaped Nun’ and toured the world recounting the horrors she claimed to have endured in an Irish nunnery, which included attempted rape by a priest and being forced to eat worms. There is also Señor Donato, the former matador and one-legged Spanish dancer, who performed at Covent Garden where he ‘accompanied himself on the castanets to absolute perfection’; Captain Paul Boyton, who developed an inflatable rubber suit which allowed him to travel hundreds of miles floating on his back and published a memoir in 1886 with the wonderful title Roughing It in Rubber, and many more. In each case the photographed subject looks ready to break out of their pose at any moment, as if time hadn’t been frozen forever but was merely holding its breath.
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