Civil War soldier. Tintype. Chicago
Historical Society
on a mount measuring 4 x 2 1/2 inches. To take these small portraits. Disderi first made a wet-plate negative with a special camera that had several lenses and a plate-holder which moved. Eight or a dozen poses could he taken on one negative. A single print from this negative could then be cut up into eight or more separate portraits. Unskilled labor was used for this work: the production of the cameraman and printer was thus increased eightfold or more.
Disderi, a brilliant showman, made this system of mass production portraiture world famous. Napoleon III halted a column of troops he was leading out of Paris on their was to Italy in front of Disderi’s studio while he had his portrait taken. So great was the publicity that all Paris, it seems, wanted portraits. Disderi’s studio became, in the eyes of a German visitor, “really the Temple of Photography — a place unique in its luxury and elegance. Dails he sells three to lour thousand francs' worth of portraits." At twenty francs
disderi: Emperor Napoleon III of France. Carte-de-visite, reproduced actual size. Eastman Historical Photographic Collection, Rochester, N.Y.
a dozen, this sum represents a daily production of eighteen to twenty-four hundred photographs!
The “photomania” jumped to England (seventy thousand pictures of the Prince Consort were sold the week after his death) and to America (a thousand prints a day were made of Major Robert Anderson, the hero of Fort Sumter). “The year eighteen sixty-one is memorable for a revolution in pictures,” wrote the editor of the American Journal of Photography. “The card photograph has swept everything before it; and it is the style to endure.” To accommodate card photographs of relatives, friends and celebrities, elaborately bound albums were sold. The cards, of uniform size, were readily slipped into cut-out openings; the family album became a fixture in the Victorian home.
The card photograph was stylized to a formula. The figure was almost invariably taken at full length. To the American daguerreotypists the first carte-de-visite imported from France seemed comical. Abraham Bogardus, a veteran New York daguerreotypist, recollected that “it was a little thing; a man standing by a fluted column, full length, the head about twice the size of a pin. I laughed at that, little thinking I should at a day not far distant be making them at the rate of a thousand a day.” The fluted column, the book-strewn table and the velvet drape became indispensable pieces of studio furniture.
 |
| disderi: Uncut print from a carte-de-visite negative. Eastman Historical Photographic Collection, Rochester, N.Y. |
Little effort was made to bring out the character of the sitter by subtleties of lighting, by choice of attitude or expression: the posing was done too quickly to permit such individual attention.
In the face of this intense competition, portraits larger in size and less standardized in pose, lighting and concept were made by the collodion process. Paris took the lead. A school of portraitists developed a bold and vigorous style well suited to interpreting those highly individualistic personalities who made Paris the center of the artistic and literary world.
The more prominent portraitists had for the most part been Young Romantics of the Latin Quarter, living the Vie de Boheme as second-rate painters, caricaturists and writers. Nadar, whose real name was Gaspard-Felix Tour-nachon, contributed sketches and articles to comic magazines and founded a new one. He planned a vast series of caricatures, the Pantheon-Nadar, of
 |
| paul nadar: Portrait of his father. Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, called Nadar. Negative in collection Mme Paul Nadar, Paris; print courtesy Daniel Masclet |
everybody prominent in Paris: and to gather documents for the thousands of sketches to be included, he turned to photography. In 1853 he opened a photographic studio in Paris with his brother Adrian. At first he made daguerreotypes, but he quickly took up the collodion process, using large plates to record the famous people who flocked to his studio, which had become a favorite meeting place. His portrait style was simple and straightforward: he took his friends usually three-quarter length standing under a high skylight against a plain background. The posing was subdued: the faces are seen with a directness and a penetration due partly to the fact that he knew most of the sitters intimately, but more to the potver of his vision.
All the artistic, dramatic, political galaxy — in a word the intelligentsia — of
 |
| nadar: Theophile Gautier, about 1855. Collection Georges Sirot, Paris |
ETIENNE carjat: Charles Baudelaire. Woodburytype from Galerie Contemporaine, 1870. Eastman Historical Photographic Collection, Rochester, N.Y.
 |
| nadar: Sarah Bernhardt. 1859. Negative in collection Mine Paul Nadar, Paris: print courtesy Daniel Masclet |
our time has passed through his studio. The series of portraits that he exhibits is the Pantheon — serious this time — of our generation. Daumier meditates on his epic Robert Macaire — M. Guizot stands, his hand in his waistcoat, as severe and cold as if he were waiting for silence in the court before launching into a thundering rebuttal — Corot smiles as someone asks him why doesn’t he finish his landscapes. These photographs are broadly seen . . . The photographer has the right to be called an artist.
He was a ceaseless worker. While still taking portraits, he continued to illustrate books. He was an experimenter. He took the first pictures by electric light; and, in 1856, the first photographs from a balloon. Aeronautics became an obsession: he built the largest balloon the world had seen, the Giant. On its second ascension the balloon was carried to Germany; the descent was made near Hannover. At the last moment control of the balloon was lost, and the luckless passengers were banged and dragged some twenty-five miles over open country before they finally came to rest. In 1870 Nadar was one of those who organized the balloon service by which the inhabitants of besieged Paris were able to maintain contact with the world.
His aeronautical ventures proved to be a financial failure, and he took up photography again, this time to make money. In the meanwhile competition had become enormous. “The appearance of Disderi and the carte-de-visite,” he wrote in his autobiographical Quand j’etais photographe, “spelled disaster. Either you had to succumb — that is to say, follow the trend — or resign.” And he went on to tell of his friend Gustave Le Gray who had taken up photography because of his “preoccupation with art" and who, rather than change his studio into a factory, abandoned the camera and spent the rest of his life in Egypt as an art professor.
Nadar, who lived on into the twentieth century, never again achieved the brilliance of his earlier work. The business was taken over by his son Paul in 1880, who used the bold signature of his father as a trade mark for the somewhat routine products of his studio.
Disderi, whose fortune had once been the talk of Paris, died penniless, blind and deaf, in a public hospital in Nice. He was a victim of his own invention. The system which he popularized was so easy to imitate that all over the world cartes-de-visite were being made by the million, by photographers who were hardly more than technicians.