PUBLIC FACES: PHOTOGRAPHY AS SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE 19TH

CENTURY
Many of the traits we associate with our sel2es were also present in the most popular
photographic format of the 1860s, the carte de visite.

ICP PERSPECTIVE
Aug 27, 2015

As a follow up to the Theorizing the Web 2015 #TtW15 conference

hosted in our new space on the Bowery, we present a selection of
photography-focused presentations from the conference authored by a
diverse set of academics, activists, artists, and journalists.

Photography as New Media: Continuity and Change

It can be easy to imagine that the rise of digital technologies has
rendered photography nearly unrecognizable: that the transition of
photography from 8lm to digital and the emergence of social networking
applications have fundamentally transformed the photograph's role.1 For
one thing, the de8ning trait of photography, in the eyes of many observers,
is dispensed with altogether in photography's transition to the digital:
traditionally, the hallmark characteristic of this porous and almost
inde8nable medium was "light-writing"the photographs semiotically
complex status as an index as well as an icon; not merely a
representation of the thing it depicted, but a direct imprint of light

reNected from the subject onto the 8lm.2

Even if we are concerned less with photographys ontological status than
with the practices according to which photographs are taken, viewed, and
disseminated, there are suggestions that the digital turn has occasioned
a serious shift. With the rise of photo-driven social networking
applications like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, photographs
circulate in volumes heretofore inconceivable and with unprecedented
rapidity.

Figure 1: Page from the Westmorland carte de visite album, c. 1864. J. Paul Getty Museum. Object number 84.XD.1283.

It might be tempting to assume, on these bases, that the "new media" of

the early 21st century are altogether different from the "old media" of
centuries past.3 But while a narrative of dramatic rupture is undeniably
more exciting than one of continuity, in many important respects, the
digital turn in photography is less a radical break with older uses of
photography than it is an ampli8cation and acceleration of existing
practices. And there is one episode in the history of photography that
serves as a particularly compelling reminder that photography has long
functioned as a kind of "social media": we can see a precursor to the
social sharing commonly associated with digital photography in the rise
of the carte de visite.
The carte de visite was a small, inexpensive photographic portrait
intended for circulation, which was developed in France and attained
astonishing popularity in Europe and North America between 1859 and
the 1870s. As a visual image meant to be shared, people of the
19th century saw in it a powerful means of virtual self-presentation.
Cartes allowed for a kind of social performance through photography that
in many respects anticipated the ways people of the 21st century make
use of photography. And in looking at this predecessor, we can gain
historical context for the uses of digital photography in the present day,
most notably in terms of the photograph's status as a "social currency"
through which subjects create an objecti8ed version of themselves, and
use it to initiate and maintain social relationships.
The carte de visite was an important predecessor of the digital image
in its complicity with the virtual enactment of social ties, its propensity
to destabilize public-private boundaries, and the performance of
identity that it afforded.
People of the 19th century avidly discussed the social functions of the
carte, and in examining the role of this photographic medium in the
construction, performance, and maintenance of social bonds, we see that
the photograph did not suddenly become a social medium in the
21st centuryin many respects, it has been one for a century and a half.

Social Currency and Self-ObjectiHcation

The carte de visite was a small photograph of about 2.5 by 4 inches that
was taken in a commercial photography studio, produced in multiples on
thin paper, and mounted onto card stock. These cards were then sold for
a relatively affordable priceabout one to three dollars per dozen, which
is equivalent to a real price of about $30-85 USD today. Initially, cartes
primarily featured celebrities, most prominently Napoleon III and Queen

Victoria and family, but the enormous public demand for these images of
public 8gures led photography studios to make use of this new method in
order to sell ordinary people photographs of themselves. The strategy
proved remarkably effective: people crowded the studios to get portraits
taken, which they then distributed to friends, family, and distant
acquaintances. Recipients arranged their carte collections in albums,
which they could then page through at their leisure or show off to friends
(Figure 1).
In an 1863 article in the Atlantic, entitled "Doings of the Sunbeam," Oliver
Wendell Holmes addressed the recent popularity of the carte de visite,
saying, "Card-portraitsas everybody knows, have become the social
currency, the sentimental 'Green-backs' of civilization."4
Holmess quotation is revealing for a few reasons. First, it underscores
the cartes sheer ubiquity. In England alone, 300 to 400 million cartes
were sold every year from 1861 to 1867, a stunning 8gure considering
that England's population during these years hovered around 20 million.5
It would not be a stretch to say that with the rise of the carte de visite,
the photograph became a true mass medium, capturing the likenesses
of not just a privileged elite but large swaths of the middle class, and
existing in previously unimaginable quantities.
Second, Holmess designation of the carte as a "currency" is suggestive
of the commodity status of the carte. Cartes almost always bore the
insignia of the commercial studio that produced them, sometimes on the
front of the carte and almost always on the reverseand often this
marker of the commodity status of the carte was large and elaborate
(Figure 2). So while the carte was an object that was meant to represent
the likeness of the individual it pictured, it was also an advertisement for
the studio that had produced it. This intimate commingling of individual
subjecthood with commercial inNuence in the form of advertisements is a
central feature of the social media of the 21st century, where
advertisements are a constant and sometimes discom8ting presence on
personal pro8les.
Third, Holmes' quotation, with its implications of public circulation, gets
at the fact that cartes de visite were objects that were exchanged among
people, accumulating meaning through their dissemination. The
assumption of distribution that was an inbuilt feature of the carte
informed the ways people presented themselves before the camera.
Cartes de visite were akin to currency in that they were intended to be
traded relatively indiscriminately, and they stood in for their bearer in

the same way irrespective of who was on the other end of the
exchange: both objects were treated as static representations of
something that was unstable, whether that something was pecuniary
value or personal identity.
Cartes, then, tended to present a generalized kind of selfhood, a socially
sanctioned and standardized mode of self-presentation.

Figure 2: Verso of a carte de visite by G.W. Pach of New York, c. 1859-1890. Boston Public
Library, accession number 13_05_000847.

Cartes De Visite and Context Collapse

The anticipation of public display played a crucial role in informing the
ways people presented themselves to the camera in the era of the carte
de visite. From the 8rst, cartes de visite were images that were made to
go out into the world and reach many eyes. One contemporary of the
carte wrote in 1862 that by virtue of these "universally popular" cartes,
"Nobody now needs to inquire what such-or-such a person may be like, or
to be left to such surmises as written descriptions may convey of
features and 8gures that cannot be actually seen. An ubiquitous carte de
visite can always 8nd its way with certainty and speed, and it is the best
of all possible introductions, as it is the most agreeable of
reminiscences."6
Similarly, the digital portrait photograph in the age of social media tends
to be driven by an imperative of public (or semi-public) visibility, whether
one is posting a #no8lter sel8e on Instagram, an album of baby pictures
on Facebook, or a professional headshot on LinkedIn. In each of these
cases, the anticipation of dissemination informs the way the photograph
is created and selected for online presentation.
The publicness of the image is not a supplementary consideration that
is added onto the image after the fact; rather, the imperative of public
presentation tends to inform the way the image itself is taken.
In view of the vast array of environments in which the carte de visite
could be viewed and the generalized kind of likeness that it enabled, one
fruitful way to consider the carte is in terms of the context collapse that
digital media scholars including danah boyd and Alice Marwick have
identi8ed as a salient feature of social networking. Given the distinct
possibility that ones online presence could conceivably be consumed in a
vast variety of different contexts by a vast variety of different spectators,
those who create online content must increasingly factor an "imagined
audience" into their decisions about how to present themselves online.7
The problem of context collapse also informed the creation and reception
of the carte de visite. Because of the imperative of circulation, the
challenge that photographed subjects faced was to present themselves
in such a way that their carte would "come off well" irrespective of who
was looking at it.

Figure 3: Daguerreotype portrait of unidenti8ed man by Southworth & Hawes, c. 1850. International Center of Photography.

The Presentation of Self in Public Photography

Because one's carte de visite portrait was intended for an indeterminate
and potentially large audience that was likely to make assumptions about
the sitters character and class based on super8cial signi8ers, there were
motivations for people to adopt a visual persona that presented them in
an idealized fashion. Ostensibly, subjects did this with the hope that their
carte would serve a performative function, bringing about social effects
through certain kinds of carefully calibrated self-presentation.
Earlier forms of photographic portraituremost notably the
daguerreotypehad tended to focus closely on the facial features,

offering a sustained, detailed limning of the face (Figure 3). But cartes de
visite demanded a different tack. In their cartes, sitters began to don
fashionable clothing, stood in front of ornate backdrops, and assumed
poses that connoted the sort of attitude they wanted the world to see.
(Figure 4). Photography studios helped to perpetuate these conventions,
by providing people sitting in their waiting rooms with instructions on how
to pose and decorating their studios with examples of successful images.
People were thus guided toward appropriate modes of self-presentation
in their photographs through cues from other ones. People critical of
these standardized, middle-class modes of self-presentation often
mocked the sameness and conventionality of the images, which were
sometimes visually similar to the point of being almost identical. This
sort of complaint about the clichd poses of carte de visite sitters came
to be pervasive in photography journals, and it bears resemblance to
present-day laments about duckface and other visual conventions of
sel8es. But given the purpose of these images, such critiques seem to
miss the mark. The carte de visite was less about individualism and
uniqueness than it was about engaging in a shared social ritual, and the
same could be argued of sel8es in the age of digital media.8
Alice Marwick has referred to the dynamic of self-presentation that one
encounters in social networking applications as social surveillance,
saying, "Technically mediated communities are characterized by both
watching and a high awareness of being watched."9 The awareness of
being watched is an inbuilt feature of virtually all portrait photography,
most of which is predicated on the adoption of a certain pose with the
anticipation of being captured by the camera. But this deep concern for
how one comes offthis intensely self-conscious self-presentationwas
a particularly powerful motivator for subjects of the carte de visite, with
the anticipation of public dissemination informing the ways sitters
arrayed themselves before the camera.

Figure 4: Carte de visite portrait of unidenti8ed woman by W. R. Phipps, c. 1870s-1890s. International Center of Photography.

If the expectation of circulation 8gured into the ways ordinary people

posed for their carte de visite portraits, it was an even more pressing

force in portraits of those who were already "public 8gures." One

especially prominent sitter was Sojourner Truth, the abolitionist and
womens suffrage advocate, who demonstrated an uncommon degree of
reNexivity in her carte de visite portraits (Figures 5 and 6). Appearing with
the slogan "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance" emblazoned
below her portrait, Truth was a social media celebrity avant la lettre, using
her carte to present a thoughtfully honed public face to the world while
also generating income to support her speaking engagements. Drawing
on the new form of visual "publicness" that the carte enabled, Truth was
able to share with the public a piece of her likeness, one that presented
her according to the visual conventions she desired. In a homelike
setting, wearing modest and chaste clothes while working on a piece of
knitting, she drew on prevailing codes of what Augusta Rohrbach has
called "genteel and domestic femininity"offering an implicit rejoinder to
the question that punctuated her famous 1851 speech in Akron, Ohio,
"Ar'n't I a Woman?"10
Deborah Willis has written that among black Americans more generally,
as photography became more accessible in the late 19th and early
20th centuries, it came to serve as a powerful means of self-fashioning.
"Photographs did much more than record the presence of black men and
women in America," she writes, "they became a communal image of
prestige and power."11

Figure 5: Carte de visite portrait of Sojourner Truth, 1864. International Center of Photography.

Visual Performance and Lived Experience

If, in the 21st century, it seems simplistic to regard a photograph as a
mere reNection of "the world as it is," we might do well to give more credit
to our predecessors in the 1860s, who often demonstrated a canny
understanding of the fact that a photographic portrait could toy with
realityor just subtly shape reality in its own image. Through the capacity
that they offered for a consciously constructed and easily transmissible
likeness, cartes de visite could serve as a means of presenting to the
world an image of oneself that did not need to be altogether consistent
with one's lived experiences. The carte, an object whose consumption
seemed to hold the possibility of materially altering one's social
circumstances by offering a means of Nattering public self-presentation,
gained meaning through its circulation in society. Its success was
predicated on the understanding that in looking a certain wayin
possessing a given deportment and style of dressa person earns the
right to be regarded in a certain light. As a photograph that could impact
relations among people, the carte de visite not only embodied prevailing
social norms, it helped to create and reshape them as well.
Annie Rudd teaches at Columbia University, where she received her
Ph.D. in Communications in 2014. Her book in progress, "The Posed and
the Candid," examines the meaning of posing in 19th-century portrait
photography, and traces the rise of an aestheticand a politicsof
photographic candor in the 20th century.
1. This idea is supported by a recent explosion of books, articles, and symposia discussing
what remains of photography as we know it in the wake of the shift to digital. SFMOMAs
2010 symposium, Is Photography Over? is a prominent exampleone in which, tellingly,
several panelists misremembered the symposiums title as Is Photography Dead? At times,
these proclamations are couched in terms of what is presented as the photographs new
manipulability, and consequent unreliability, in the age of Adobe Photoshopa concern that is
beyond the scope of this paper, but is given valuable historicization in Playing with Pictures:
The Art of Victorian Photocollage, ed. Elizabeth Siegel (Chicago and New Haven: Art Institute
of Chicago and Yale University Press, 2009).
2. Charles Sanders Peirce, What is a Sign? The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical

Writings, Vol. II, 1893-1913 (Indiana University Press, 1998), 4-10.

3. On the complexities that inhere in the designation of new media, see Lisa Gitelman,

Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (MIT Press, 2006).
4. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Doings of the Sunbeam, Soundings from the Atlantic (Boston:
Ticknor and Fields, 1864), 255.

5. William C. Darrah, Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth Century Photography (Gettysburg, PA: W.

C. Darrah, 1981), 24.
6. Cartes de Visite, The Art-Journal, Vol. VII (1861), 306.
7. Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd, I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users,
context collapse, and the imagined audience, New Media & Society 13.1 (February 2011),
114-133.
8. On sel8es and the theoretical stakes of the gestures they necessitate and depict, see Paul
Frosh, The Gestural Image: The Sel8e, Photography Theory, and Kinesthetic Sociability,

International Journal of Communication 9 (2015), 1607-1628.

9. Alice E. Marwick, The Public Domain: Surveillance in Everyday Life, Surveillance & Society
9.4 (2012), 379.
10. Augusta Rohrbach, Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth in Black and White, Pictures

and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, ed. Maurice O.
Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith (Duke University Press, 2012), 88-89.
11. Deborah Willis, Representing the New Negro, African American Vernacular Photography:

Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection (ICP/Steidl, 2005), 18.

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