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| Confirmation photo: This photograph of the writer's grandfather and his sister helped convince German relatives that she and
her sister were truly family. Courtesy of Phyllis Kuehn |
A family reunited by an old photograph
The stilted photo, more than 100 years old, was the key to convincing the German branch of the family that the Americans were genuine.
By Phyllis Kuehnfrom the November 7, 2007 edition
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Like many families, we have custody of old pictures that are too precious to discard but frustratingly unlabeled. The long-gone relatives, so stiffly posed in these little portraits, knew who they were and saw no reason to write names or dates on the back. They couldn't have imagined who would be looking at the pictures more than a hundred years later, wondering about the people, the occasion, even how the pictures survived.
Many of these pictures are the cardboard cartes de visite, literally calling cards or visiting cards, although that was not how they were popularly used. But in our family, one of these old pictures did become our calling card for "visiting" a family that separated in the 1890s.
Photography got its popular start in 1839 with the invention of the daguerreotype. Later came pictures in the form of ambrotypes on glass. Such early pictures were one of a kind; no negative for multiple copies existed in these processes.
Tintypes, also known as ferrotypes, were introduced in the mid-1850s, but the real popularization of photography came with the carte de visite.
Cartes de visite were so named because they were the size of calling cards of that era. The photo was pasted on cardboard measuring 2-1/2 inches by 4 inches, usually with the photographer's business information beautifully presented on the back.
Parisian photographer André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri patented this new albumen-based process in 1854 using a camera with four lenses that efficiently and cheaply allowed up to eight prints to be made from a single glass negative plate.
Suddenly nearly everyone could afford a family photo, at least for special occasions. Disdéri and his process, it is said, became wildly famous after Napoleon III stopped his march to Italy to pose in Disdéri's studio for his own portrait. The carte de visite craze was born.
Carte albums could be found in virtually every Victorian parlor, collections that included not only family members but also famous people such as actors and singers. "Card portraits, as everybody knows, have become the social currency, the 'green-backs' of civilization," Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1863.
Photographers made fortunes. The biography of one British photographer reported that more than half a million eggs were being delivered to his studio each year to meet the demand for these prints! (They were made with the albumen from egg whites mixed with salt to make a shiny surface and bind the photographic chemicals.)
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