Page 78 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri: multiple contact-proofs of cartes des visite from his patented 4- lens camera. c1861 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9-Adolphe-Eug%C3%A8ne_Disd%C3%A9ri
Disdéri was the entrepreneur who fuzed two ideas together - photo-portraits and visiting cards and called them carte des visite - such a simple idea was impossible to patent-protect and by the 1860s cartes had become a widespread collectible medium - and a decades-long period of ‘carte-mania followed:
“The diminutive-format albumen photographs, mounted on cards measuring ten by six centimetres,
had been conceived of in Paris in 1854. Yet in the English-speaking world it wasn’t until the Queen saw
fit to have herself documented in this way – and in relatable semblances and settings – that the
populace began to embrace cartes as a novel, affordable way of collecting images, whether of royals
and other luminaries or, increasingly, of themselves.” (National Portrait Gallery, Australia https:// www.portrait.gov.au/exhibitions/carte-o-mania-2018).
Now, these multiple contact-proofs have the modernist fascination of Bernd and HillaBecher’s 1960s photographic typologies - serial sets of images on subjects like industrial buildings and artefacts - a fascination with serial, repetitive imagery that was shared notably by Andy Warhol.