Carte de visite

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Two examples of carte de visite photographs taken during the American Civil War. Each soldier shown here served with the 77th Illinois Volunteer Infantry.

The carte de visite (CdV or carte-de-visite) was a type of photograph made popular from the mid-1850s in Europe and from 1860 and on in America. Usually an albumen print, the carte de visite is a photograph measuring 2.125 x 3.5 inches mounted on a card sized 2.5 x 4 inches. The carte de visite was popularized by Parisian photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri when in May 1859 he had the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time as Napoleon III interrupted his march to war to pose for a photograph in Disdéri’s studio. A few years earlier, in 1854, Disdéri patented a method of taking eight separate negatives on a single plate.

Each photograph was the size of a visiting card, which—in large part due to Napoleon III's visit to Disdéri's studio—became enormously popular and were traded among friends and visitors. The immense popularity of these photos-as-calling-cards led to the publication and collection of photographs of prominent persons. Card mania spread throughout Europe and then quickly to America. Albums for the collection and display of cards became a common fixture in Victorian parlors.

By the late 1860s, cartes de visite were supplanted by "cabinet cards," which were also usually albumen prints, but larger, mounted on cardboard backs measuring 4.5 by 6.5 inches. These remained popular into the early twentieth century, when Kodak introduced the Brownie camera and home snapshot photography became a mass phenomenon.

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University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections – 19th Century Actors Photographs Cartes-de-visite studio portraits of entertainers, actors, singers, comedians and theater managers who were involved with or performed on the American stage in the mid- to late 1800s.