Is it possible cartes de visite were a precursor to selfies and Instagram? The diminutive albumen photographs, mounted on cards measuring ten by six centimetres, captured everyday life and were meant to be shared.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The process became popular in the 1860s after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and their children sat for a series of portraits.
But it wasn’t just royalty taking advantage of these developments in photography. Soon everyday people were heading to studios, where, for a matter of shillings, they too could have their portraits captured.
Cartes were collected and swapped, left as calling cards when you visited friends, and perhaps exchanged during business.
Now more than 100 cartes have gone on display in the exhibition Carte-O-Mania at the National Portrait Gallery, giving visitors a snapshot of Australian life in the late 1800s.
“Cartes de visite were the things that enabled people to become obsessed with their own image,” gallery curator Joanna Gilmour says.
“And also obsessed with images of other people, whether that be family or friends, or celebrities, or politicians, or scandalous people.
“They were very affordable, you could go to a studio and get maybe a dozen portraits of yourself for a reasonable fee.
“They were tiny, you could collect them, and slot them into albums, they were designed to be collected and distributed.”
Ms Gilmour says cartes de visite occupied a very critical point in time, in terms of the development of photography.
“It was [after] the advent of daguerreotypes, which were invented in the late 1830s. That was the first commercially viable form of of photography, but they were one-off images,” she said.
“While it was cheaper than having your portrait painted, it was still beyond the means of most people.
“By the advent of 35mm film and Kodak cameras in the 1880s, which meant everyone could take their own photos, cartes had almost disappeared.”
Gilmour said she wanted to look at life in post-gold rush Australia through a different lens.
“We often talk about the gold rush in terms of population growth and law and order, but I wanted to present a more vivid and colourful view of the cultural impact of the gold rush,” she said.
“If you look at the opera singers, the actors, the performers, who were coming out to cash in on the gold rush, these cartes show a lot of them.
“A lot of the photographers were men who came out here, perhaps hoping to make money on the gold rush, but they soon realised they could make more money going back to their profession of photography.”
The stories of the photographers are often as interesting as their subjects. One case in point is the portrait of Marie Sibly (c. 1830–1894), a “mesmerist and phrenologist” who performed in towns throughout Australia for nearly 20 years. Purportedly French-born, she arrived in Sydney around 1867 and worked as a clairvoyant. By 1871 she was in Melbourne, "manipulating heads" for packed houses. Through the 1870s she toured New South Wales and Queensland, her shows incorporating séances, phrenological readings and hypnotisms whereby audiences members were induced to fight, dance, sing or behave absurdly.
Her photographer was James E Bray, who by the late 1860s was running a thriving studio in Beechworth, where he notably was among the photographers who documented the Kelly gang.
The Carte-O-Mania exhibition not only has physical cards on display but uses technology to enable viewers to see each individual card on a screen, in full detail and with viewers having the capacity to zoom in on the image.
“The originals are so tiny but there is so much information in them,” Ms Gilmour said.
“It was important that we allowed access [to] all of that detail.”
Carte-O-Mania runs at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, until April 22, 2019.
