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very concept of the carte-de-visite as a kind of visual
identity card engendered the related concept of the card
album with slots of uniform size for sliding in cards, and
by 1880 socially prominent families would often have
collected enough cards to fi ll several of these 100- or
200-card albums. Similarly, the standardized format of
stereoviews was intended to fi t in popular stereoscopes
and special boxes, which might typically hold fi fty
stereoviews, a number that is probably indicative of the
extent of an ordinary stereo collection in a well-to-do
urban household around 1875. Amateur photographic
clubs developed in some cases as arenas for exchang-
ing, comparing, and discussing stereoviews and other
pictures; the same would be true, around 1900, for il-
lustrated postcards, which in many ways continued the
tradition of 19th-century photographic collections, while
introducing photography into the realm of private cor-
respondence. Finally, one of the more signifi cant types
of photographic object produced in the 19th-century
was the photographically illustrated book, a category
that actually covered a wide array of techniques and
practices, from hand-made and hand-captioned single-
copy photographic albums to full-fl edged publications
including photographic prints or, more commonly,
photolithographs. Although photographic books are
not the subject of this entry, it is worth mentioning here
that the whole association of photography and paper,
from William Henry Fox Talbot’s research on, was
geared precisely at making photographs that would be
compatible with the space and economy of books and
more generally printed matter, thus emphasizing their
iconic, iconographic, and informational dimensions, as
opposed to their materiality and their exhibition value
as separate objects. At the same time, the urgency and
diffi culty of this association of photography with the
book also hinted back at the resilient materiality of
photographs, a factor one needs to take into account
in order to understand more generally why so much
of 19th-century photographic practice tended to treat
photographs as objects.
One of the typical features of 19th-century photog-
raphy is that it nourished the desire of producing a total
illusion of reality—of replacing real things with images
that were as life-like as possible—with a still primitive
state of technology, which could only produce this illu-
sion by resorting to and often paradoxically foreground-
ing its own infrastructure of objects, materials, and tools.
Some of the more obvious examples of this paradox
are panoramic photography, magnesium lighting, and
especially photosculpture, a pre-holographic technique
that was devised as early as the 1850s and that consisted
of sculpting, with the help of a pantograph, from several
photographs of a given subject taken at different angles.
The three-dimensional illusion was more ordinarily real-
ized after 1860 by stereophotography, and in this case
also all the paraphernalia that surrounded the production
as well as the contemplation of stereoviews functioned
as a framework for the rapturous experience of seeing
“solid pictures” or “sun sculptures.” According to Oliver
Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum, with stereography
“form is henceforth divorced from matter,” and “matter
as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except
as the mould on which form is shaped” (“The Stereo-
scope and the Stereograph,” 1859). The “mould,” in this
case, included the mounted cards and every aspect of
their production, as well as the stereoscope itself, and
the various implements used to store and transport the
cards. Another striking illustration of photography’s
materiality is the fact that glass remained for much of
the century, and into the 20th, the dominant base in nega-
tive-positive processes. The glass processes perpetuated
preciousness, weight, and fragility as inherent charac-
teristics of photography. Meanwhile, the unfeasibility of
enlargements called for a scale of equipment, production
space, and transportation that, with the increasingly
large formats practiced by landscape photographers
especially, could only emphasize the “hardware” aspect
of the medium, and therefore its visibility as a technol-
ogy, as opposed to its semantic and artistic dimensions.
The materiality of photographs, however, was not just
the result of technological constraints; rather, it should
be seen as a cultural framework that governed much
of the technological evolution itself, as is shown by
countless 19th-century experiments on adapting pho-
tographs to virtually every type of base or surface, a
spectacular example being the cyanotypes on cloth used
by American home quilt-makers after 1880. Although
“blueprint” quilts served memorial functions, it often
seems that the production of photographic objects—i.e.,
the actual transformation of images into objects—was
a goal in itself, beyond whatever social uses may have
been intended. As a result, although photography as
an abstract entity was called upon as a tool of truthful
illustration, decoration, or commemoration, the very
diverse objects it was produced with and applied to
consistently advertised the parallel or parasite message
of its own technicality and materiality.
After the realm of private practices, comparable
observations may be made about many 19th-century
institutional practices wherein the acquisition, accu-
mulation, and conservation of photographic archives
seem to have obeyed a self-justifying logic, whether
or not actual utilitarian or documentary benefi ts can be
ascribed to these archives. Strictly commercial interests,
such as those of railroad companies and early tourist
businesses, would justify investments in photography
as a tool of illustrating landscape and thus promoting a
fi rm’s service. In the United States, the major railroad
companies sometimes outfi tted a special photographic
car that served as an exhibition and sales room for views