468
had risen to 2800 and the portrait studios had risen from
66 in 1855 to over 200; in 1866 when the carte-de-visite
craze had reached its peak there were 284. The aver-
age of a wage of a photographer was between £6.000
and £12.000, earned by Mayall who outstripped other
English professionals, and the costs for a sitting was
1 guinea for twelve cartes-de-visite and £2 for twelve
cabinets In Contrast to the impressive sum earned by
a large number of photographers, their assistants, who
worked from 8 am to 6 pm, received on the average £2
to £3 per week. The top wage for the fi rst-class studio
operators was £250 per year. They were required to
work both before and after the image had been taken,
chemists were needed to prepare negatives, printers to
develop the proofs, labourers to colour and stick the
prints. In Paris in the mid-1860s the number of studios
employing more than ten people was less than ten per
cent. Small, family-run concerns, with one or two em-
ployees, were still more numerous by far during this
period, even though there were photographers like Nadar
and Disdéri who employed the up to 50 assistants and
80 assistants respectively.
Photographic art reproductions tapped into the
growing middle-class who could afford photographs
of themselves in the same elegant and luxurious sur-
rounding of the nobility. They started collecting, and
this marked boomed after 1865, when new pigment and
photomechanical processes such as carbon and Wood-
burytype facilitated stable and relatively inexpensive
photographic reproductions, even though the patent
fee for this process was still high as Goupil & Co. of
Paris acquired the rights for France for 150.000 francs
(then £6.000).
Mass-produced photographs were fi nally so inex-
pensive that only the largest fi rms could profi t from
them, and as the market became saturated with each
new product type, prices dropped. In the 1860s over-
production and economic stagnation reduced prices and
competition was fi erce, studios turned to larger formats
such as cabinet cards.
At the height of the carte-de-visite period, 300 to
400 million cartes were estimated to be sold annually
in England. So great was the number that more than one
Chancellor of the Exchequer contemplated, following
America’s example, materially adding to the national
income by a small tax on each photograph. Between
1864 and 1866 Americans had to affi x a stamp to the
back of all photographs, ranging in value from 2 to 5
cents. Gladstone considered a penny tax in 1864, and
so did Disraeli in 1868, when it was stated that a penny
stamp on the roughly 5 million photographs sold an-
nually would help in the prosecution of the Abyssinian
war. This lower fi gure illustrates clearly the decline in
the demand of cartes.
The situation worsened in the 1870s with a severedepression on both sides of the Atlantic, aggravated by
war. In Paris, many studios went bankrupt during the
Prussian siege and the mayhem of the Paris Commune
drove wealthy clients out to the provinces. The last thirty
years of the 19th century were marked by economic
fl uctuation, with a decline in output between 1875 and
1884, and recession in 1873 and 1893. The photographic
market had been held back by the perishability of ma-
terials, inhibiting standardization and mass production,
and the relative complexity of products had restricted
the amateur market.1880s and 1890s
The market changed again with the commercial intro-
duction of gelatine bromide dry-plate negatives and
printing papers in the 1880s. Few photographers had
the necessary time or skill to use this process, so com-
mercial manufactures took on the production of ready-
sensitized materials, whose adoption was slowed by
high prices, technical inconsistencies, and the need to
light-proof apparatus and darkrooms. Cameras became
simpler and cheaper, their cost ranged between £5 and
£32. Eastman’s core business was fi lm and paper, and
the cameras were essentially vehicles to increase de-
mand; the company’s processing and printing services
cost up to 50 per cent of the initial outlay for a camera.
The prices charged by the leading fi rms for gelatine dry
plate were between 3 shillings to £1 and 6 shillings per
dozen, depending on size, in 1880 and between 1 and
10 shillings per dozen in 1890.
From 1880 the growth of the studios in London
was in line with the population and fl uctuated between
260 and 280 with a pick of 340 in 1900. The amateur
market grew steadily, as social mobility and disposable
income increased, and a gradual reduction in working
hours produced a boom in leisure activities. Existing
photographic associations were reinvigorated and new
amateur clubs started; their numbers grew tenfold
from1880-90. Women became a notable constituency: as
early as 1886, women’s magazines carried photographic
advertisements and from 1889 Eastman publicity illus-
trated women using Kodak cameras. The importance
attached to advertising is indicated by the fact that
Kodak in Britain spent nearly £5.000 on advertising to
persuade amateur photographers to spend more or to
buy their product in preference to another. In the mid-
1880s advertising was absolutely crucial in the fl edgling
market for amateur photography to fl ourish. Tradition-
ally photographic goods had only been advertised in
specialist publications, aimed at a limited audience. By
1900, women made up 30 per cent of British amateur
photographers, and the US census listed more than 3.500
female professionals. At the end of the 19th century, with
the spread of the dry-plate process and the simplifi cationECONOMICS AND COSTS
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