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Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 28/146
many cartes of family and friends, and patronised Mayall as a court photographer. Mayall (an Amer- ican), retailed his cartes, selling tens of thousands of them to an eager public through his prestigi- ous premises in London’s Regent Street. Mayall charged 1 guinea (£1.05) for a set of 12 cartes, and 5 guineas (£5.25) for a set of hand-coloured cartes. (To give something of the scale of his operation, when the Prince Consort died in 1861, Mayall sold around 70,000 of his cartes of Albert.
The carte de visite was of course only one of a spate of innovations that extended the art of photo- graphy into fields as diverse as criminal records, charity archives, scientific evidence, cabinet cards, cigarette cards, photographically illustrated books, daguerreotype lockets, and the elaborate bio- metrical systems that appeared at the end of the century (the Bertillonage photo-card system, 1890). The earliest surviving family photo albums in the Smithsonian are from the 1850s - so around the time of the Royale Cartes, people were collecting and mounting their own photographs. The casual photos were christened ‘snap-shots’ by Julia Margaret Cameron’s friend Sir John Herschel in 1860. Typically ornately bound books, the Victorian photo-album was made up of card pages, each printed with a gothic, geometric or floral designs, with rectangles left in which to mount the photos. Of course, these became precious personal and family mementos, and were certainly in widespread use until the advent of digital sadly made them redundant. Mayall is showing great foresight in ad- opting the album format.
Clementina Maude, Viscountess Hawarden: Photographs 1863.
(The image above left is possibly a self-portrait). Hawarden was a notable amateur photographer who exhibited at the Photographic Society in 1863, where her work was commended for its ‘artistic excellence’ and composition. The balance between ‘amateur’ and professional at this time were ex- tremely flexible - Hawarden is known to have made commissioned portraits of childhood friends of Charles Dodgson, while her near-contemporary, Julia Margaret Cameron, although she regularly |(if intermittently) had commissions, was driven by her own artistic aspiration, and did not wish to be- come a ‘professional photographer’. Hawarden mostly photographed her family - her daughters Clementina, Florence Elizabeth and Isabella Grace, and it is in these portraits, with their revelation of pubertal feminine introspection, a state of coming of age dreamlike reverie that Hawarden captu- res so well, seemingly completely empathic to the dawning aesthetic sensibility marked by the Ra- tional Dress Movement, and the pre-Raphaelite painters and their models, lovers and wives. Ce- mentina, Lady Hawarden died age 43 in 1865, (just a year after Julia Margaret Cameron was given her own camera). Hawarden’s work (mostly in the form of albumen prints from Wet -Collodion glass plates) is better known now in the 21st century. Some 750 photographs - mostly prints cut from old
family photo-albums - were donated by the Hawarden family to the V&A Museum in 1939 https://en.wi- kipedia.org/wiki/Clementina_Maude,_Viscountess_Hawarden