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Our lives today revolve around a media and ideas largely shaped by two related nineteenth-century phenomena. In the 1860s a revolution occurred, which transformed the way people understood the world around them and the way they related to other places and other peoples. This change was sparked by the popularity in the early 1860s of two styles of photograph: the carte de visite and the stereograph.
Photography, of course, had already caught the imagination of artists and inventors in the decade or two since the announcement of the daguerreotype in 1839. But throughout those first decades obtaining a photographic portrait remained largely the province of the well-to-do and most photographers were operating in the same aristocratic tradition that surrounded painting.
By 1851, the making of photographic prints on paper was becoming practical. That year the stereograph was displayed at the London Crystal Palace Exhibition. The stereograph on view consisted of two photographic prints (calotypes) that, when properly viewed, merge into a three-dimensional representation of a scene. Out of this nineteenth-century "virtual reality" developed the "parlor travel" that made the world's great works of art and architecture and the many native peoples of the world familiar to everyone. The stereograph greatly changed to educational outlook of people.
In 1860, a small photographic print mounted on a card, called a carte de visite by its inventor, had become one of the greatest phenomenons of the nineteenth-century. Soon after its introduction everyone from celebrated persons down to the middle-class family sought to have their portrait made. Thus began the idea of celebrity and an increasing obsession with self that would become the hallmark of modern art. The carte de visite also brought the same kinds of images into the home that the stereograph did---many carte de visite views were one half of a stereo pair. It created the photograph album and the orderly universe within. The carte de visite gave us a taste for images. And like a flood, those images would slowly creep into every book, magazine and into our lives.
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