How cartomania captivated even Queen Victoria

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.

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.