[Studio Portrait: Two Men each Holding Bamboo, Singapore]

John Thomson

1860s · Albumen silver print · Photographs

The carte de visite, a format comprised of an approximately 2 x 4 inch photograph mounted to card stock, was perhaps the most ubiquitous of nineteenth-century photographs. The French studio portrait photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri first patented the carte in 1854. His innovation of exposing not just one but eight photographic images on the same glass plate negative enabled cartes to be made cheaply and reproduced on a mass scale. During the late 1850s and throughout the latter half of the century, these economical keepsakes depicting portraits of loved ones, celebrities, monarchs, and foreign types circulated en masse and spurred a veritable "cartomania." Collected in albums, traded among friends, and admired in drawing rooms, cartes put photography in the hands of virtually everyone, and thus offered a means of reflecting upon one’s own social standing in an ever-expanding world.

Artist

John Thomson

Date

1860s

Medium

Albumen silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2017