Page 98 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 98/206
John Jabez Edwin Mayall: Royal Album of Carte de Visite 1862
Andre Disderi had patented one of the first ‘media-extensions’ of photography in 1854 - introducing the carte de visite format - a 9x6cm photographic visiting card, that soon became immensely collectable, and - like party invitations - were items of prestige and display on the family mantlepiece. Of course royal cartes (cartes of English aristocracy, the royal family and visiting royals from Europe), were highly valued. Queen Victoria herself was a great fan of photography, as was Albert, the Prince Consort, and they collected many cartes of family and friends, and patronised Mayall as a court photographer. Mayall (an American), retailed his cartes, selling tens of thousands of them to an eager public through his prestigious 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 70,000 cartes of Albert! Far from threatening the art of portraiture, photography - through the cartes de visite - had extended the reach of portraiture to almost everyone in the country. Mayall's real coup however was his gatefold album of Royal Cartes (above), of which he sold something like 60,000 units - the album had empty spaces into which buyers could add their own collected cartes - Disderi and Mayall had created an interactive, participative, social, collectible, extension to the photo-medium - as early as 1862!
The carte de visite was of course only one of a spate of innovations that extended the art of photography into fields as diverse as criminal records, charity archives, scientific evidence, cabinet cards, cigarette cards, photographically illustrated books, daguerreotype lockets, and the elaborate biometrical 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 adopting the album format.