HF The History of Photography 600pág

302 The collodion period
Pl 190
Pl 191
subjects to insignificant little views. Gustave Le Gray and Roger Fenton, too, preferred
to withdraw from photography altogether rather than lower their standards.
Carte-size landscapes are the forerunners of picture postcards, for which the vogue
began in Germany about I 884 (for landscapes), though in England they were not
introduced until 1901 and represented celebrities-chiefly actresses.20 The size was
1 · 7 · _J_ · 3 ·
32 m. x 2s m. or 5!r m. x I4 m.
Among other carte novelties were 'mosaics', introduced in I 862. These combined
many separate portraits on one print-for instance, the whole royal family, the British
Association Meeting, I 862, or the Bishops of the Church of England. Disderi, who
patented the idea in France in April I 863, produced a carte containing no fewer than
320 'pinhead' portraits of famous contemporaries.
The 'Diamond Cameo' portrait registered by F. R. Window of London in 1864
shows four small medallions representing different views of the head, punched into
convexity to give a semblance of relief.
An Irish linen firm in Paris, the Compagnie Irlandaise, introduced in I 865 cartesize
portraits of their customers printed on handkerchiefs.
Carte-de-visite cameras. How were carte-de-visite pictures made? In his Manual
of Photographic Manipulation (1858) LAKE PRICE described a stereoscopic camera with
four lenses, with which two pairs of stereoscopic pictures could be taken, or, by
means of a repeating back, four pairs. Two years later the London photographer
c. JABEZ HUGHES adapted this camera for taking eight carte-de-visite portraits on one
plate rot in. x st in.,21 exposing first one-half of the plate and then the other. The
camera was fitted with four identical lenses of short focus (4f in.), and the interior
was divided into four compartments, one for each lens. If only one pose was required
the photographer would make two exposures, each time opening all lenses at once.
For a variety of poses, the lenses could be uncapped separately and a new pose taken
each time. Indeed, several clients might be taken on one plate. The great advantage
of this method was that eight pictures were obtained on one negative, and the resulting
contact print could be cut by unskilled labour into the separate portraits, which
were then mounted on cards. This camera did not come into use in France until I 86 I,
after the Paris optician Hermagis had designed one for Mayer & Pierson in March
1860. It was not Disderi's invention, as is sometimes erroneously stated; he originally
worked with a single-lens camera based on Claudet's multiplicator.
Photographers who could not afford a four-lens camera adapted binocular
cameras, with which two almost identical photographs were taken on one plate, or,
used in conjunction with a repeating back, two pairs of negatives were obtained on
a plate '7t in. x 4t in. It was Claudet's improved multiplying camera, shown at the
Great Exhibition I 8 5 I, which first introduced the repeating back or multiplying
action to the public. Fitted with a lens of short focal length (5 in.) and comparatively
large aperture (3 in.), it was possible to obtain on one negative several small portraits,
each representing the same person in a different pose, or a number of people grouped
together. The several consecutive exposures were made by a sideways and downward
movement of the dark-slide. The resulting pictures give rather the effect of a
series of cinematographic 'cuts', as illustrated in a photograph by WILLIAM CARRICK,
a Scottish miniature painter who, after working for Oliver Sarony in Scarborough,
opened a studio in St Petersburg. Claudet's camera was adapted by the camera manufacturer
Routledge of London, to take twelve carte portraits on one plate, with only
one lens. In this case the plate was divided into twelve parts (three rows of four)
which were brought successively in front of the lens by a sideways and downward
movement of the dark-slide.22