Portraits Cheaper by the Dozen

Photographic portraits found instant popularity because they were much cheaper than painted ones, but even so they cost more than most people could afford. In 1854, however, a French photographer named Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi brought portraits within reach of practically everyone by inventing a new type of camera. Equipped with several lenses, it cut costs by taking as many as a dozen pictures on one 6,5 x 8,5 inch plate.

         Disderi's innovation went largely un­noticed until 1859, when the Emperor Napoleon III, about to embark for Italy, halted his troops in front of the photog­rapher's studio and went inside to have his portrait made by the new method. After word of this got around, Disderi suddenly found himself besieged by Parisians wanting their own portraits made. Within months, the rage for these tiny likenesses-called carles-de-visite because they were often left by visitors in place of printed calling cards -spread across France, England and the United States. To serve the seem­ingly insatiable demand, hundreds of studios throughout Europe and Ameri­ca were established, and photogra­phers competed to cut prices even more. The size of the individual por­traits got even smaller as photogra­phers devised ways to squeeze as many as 12 images on a single plate.

An early carte-de-visite camera had a focusing knob on each lens. Some cameras had lenses of different focal lengths so that views of different sizes, ranging from full-length to close-up, could be taken simultaneously. 

In a carte-de-visite print, shown before being cut into separate pictures, a young lady tries out six coy poses. They were taken with an improved camera that allowed the photographer to mask sections of the plate so that he could expose one view at a time. Thus the customer could strike several different poses for the price of one. 

The inventor of such tiny multiple portraits, Disderi-cenown above in one of his carte-de-visite photographs-became the Emperor's court photographer, made a fortune, spent it and died a pauper.