Carte de Visite

Carte de Visite

The carte de visite (CdV or carte-de-visite) was a type of photograph made popular from the mid-1850’s in Europe and from 1860 and on in America. Usually an albumen print, the carte de visite is a photograph measuring 2.125 x 3.5 inches mounted on a card sized 2.5 x 4 inches. It was popularized by Parisian photographer Andre Disdéri in 1859. A few years earlier, in 1854, Disdéri had patented a method of taking eight separate negatives on a single plate.

Each photograph was the size of a visiting card. They became enormously popular and were traded among friends and visitors. The immense popularity of these photos-as-calling-cards led to the publication and collection of photographs of prominent persons. Card mania spread throughout Europe and then quickly to America. Albums for the collection and display of cards became a common fixture in Victorian parlors.

By the late 1860’s, cartes de visite were supplanted by "cabinet cards," which were also usually albumen prints, but larger, mounted on cardboard backs measuring 4.5 by 6.5 inches. These remained popular into the early twentieth century, when Kodak introduced the Brownie camera and home snapshot photography became a mass phenomenon.