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Britain. To mark her fourteenth wedding anniversary in
early 1854, she and Albert posed before Roger Fenton’s
camera as if they were a wedding couple, Albert in full
dress uniform—black boots replacing the white leg-
gings of his wedding tunic—and Victoria in a simplifi ed
recreation of her 1840 wedding dress.
Within a decade, with photographs of Royal wed-
dings widely available as cartes-de-visite prints, the
popularity of the wedding photograph had started to
grow exponentially. From the mid 1860s, photographers
regularly advertised ‘wedding groups’ in the range of
commissions they undertook, and by the end of the
century the wedding photograph was an expected part
of marriage costs. The specifi c album of wedding pho-
tographs, while not unknown in the nineteenth century,
was largely a twentieth century innovation.
After the wedding, the photograph of the baby was
an obvious market to develop, and with child mortality
much higher in the nineteenth century, deathbed por-
traits of children also proved a signifi cant if somewhat
macabre market for the high street professional. In the
event of unexpected infant death, the deathbed portrait
often proved the only tangible proof that the child had
ever lived.
Socially, the photograph as entertainment also pro-
vided a lucrative market for photographers—especially
with the introduction of the drawing-room stereoscope in
the 1850s. Companies such as the London Stereoscopic
& Photographic Company in Britain, and Underwood &
Underwood in America, published sets of stereo cards
on a wide range of subjects including humour, religion,
travel, and news. Individual stereo cards were avail-
able for sale from photographers and print-sellers, and
specialist journals such as The Stereoscopic Magazine
further popularized the medium.
In the days before the advent of the half-tone illustra-
tion in newspapers, boxed sets of stereoscopic views of
important events and news stories would be marketed
very quickly after the event they portrayed. Often sold
in boxes resembling leather-bound books, these sets sold
in large numbers despite the fact that they commanded
a high price.
The market for photographically illustrated books
was one of Henry Fox Talbot’s early predictions, and
despite the high cost of his 1844 Pencil of Nature, it
established a market for photographers which has grown
ever since. While such volumes were restricted by the
need to paste in real photographic prints, costs were
high and production runs small, but the demand grew
consistently. With the advent of the Woodburytype in
the 1870s, production became somewhat easier, the
permanence of the images considerably better, and the
number of illustrated books published annually consid-
erably greater.
John Hannavy
See also: Babbitt, Platt D; Beard, Richard; Caldesi;
Bourne, John Cooke; Daguerre, Louis Jacques
Mandé; Expedition Photography; Exposition
Universelle, Paris, 1855; Fenton, Roger; Frith,
Francis; Lerebours, Nicholas-Marie Paymal;
Photography as a Profession; Talbot, William Henry
Fox Talbot; Travel Photography; Underwood &
Underwood; Vignoles, Charles Blacker; Wilson,
George Washington; and Woodburytype.Further Reading
McCauley, Elizabeth Anne, Industrial Madness, Commercial
Photography in Paris, 1848–1871, New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1994.
Frizot, Michel (ed)., A New History of Photography, Cologne,
Könemann, 1998.
Henisch, Heinz K., and Henisch, Bridget A., The Photographic
Experience 1839–1914, University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1994.
Taft, Robert, Photography and the American Scene, New York:
Dover, 1964.
Welling, William, Photography in America: The Formative Years,
New York: Thomas Y Crowell, 1978.MARTENS, FRIEDRICH (1809–1875)
French inventor and photographerFriedrich Martens (sometimes incorrectly styled as von
Martens), a resident in Paris presumed to be of German
origin, designed and built the world’s fi rst daguerreotype
panoramic camera in the 1840s, the fi rst camera capable
of taking, with a single exposure, a view wider than the
fi eld of vision of the human eyes.
The camera had a fi eld of view of 150 ̊ and a geared
mechanism for rotating the lens which required the
controlled turning of a small handle at the side of the
camera. The lens, pivoting around its centre, was con-
nected to the camera body by a fl exible leather front
sleeve. At the same time, a ‘v’ shaped aperture traversed
the curved plate making the exposure, effective exposing
the sky to a smaller aperture than the foreground, and
overcoming the daguerreotype’s tendency to solarised
in the over-exposed sky. The camera manufacturer was
Paris instrument-maker, N. P. Lerebours.
By 1851 he was using collodion, and was awarded
a medal for his “talbotypes on glass” [sic] at the Great
Exhibition which read “for richness, effect and perfec-
tion of defi nition, they are the fi nest specimens it seems
possible to produce.”
He joined Léon Méhédin in the Crimea photograph-
ing scenes of the confl ict, subsequently published by
Bisson Frères, both men later working with Jean-Charles
Langlois producing panoramic images during and after
the same campaign.
John Hannavy