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Certainly our street portrait galleries are a great success:
no solemn fl ight of stairs tends to pompous rooms in
which pompous attendants preside with a severe air over
pompous portraits; no committee of selection decide on
the propriety of hanging certain portraits. Here, on the
contrary, social equality is carried to its utmost limit, and
Tom Sayers is to be found cheek-by-jowl with Lord Derby,
or Mrs Fry is hung as a pendant to Agnes Willoughby. The
only principle governing the selection of the carte-de-visite
portraits is their commercial value, and that depends upon
the notability of the person represented.
(Andrew Wynter, “Cartes de Visite,” Once a Week 6
(1861–1862): 135)For many reviewers, the democracy of the celebrity
photographs was constituted by their unfettered exhibi-
tion and circulation. Celebrity cartes broadened, albeit
slowly, the scope of the public sphere. Photographs
of the Queen could be placed side-by-side with work-
ing-class icons. The celebrity photograph created a
new marker of cultural visibility, one less connected
to traditional notions of status and wealth. Thus, at
the same time as Disdéri was busy photographing the
imperial court, Nadar was taking celebrity portraits of
the members of bohemian Paris, many of them friends
and acquaintances, including Baudelaire, Gautier, Dore,
Dumas, and Sarah Bernhardt.
In Britain, one of the earliest examples of a working-
class fi gure being turned into a celebrity through the aid
of his photographs is Tom Sayers. In April 1860, Sayers
fought the American champion, John Heenan, in what
was effectively a fi ght for the undisputed championship
of the world. Before the fi ght, Sayers was beset with
photographers claiming the honour of paying for his
sitting. However, his reported answer was “It’s no good,
gentlemen, I’ve been and sold my mug to Mr Newbold”
(Newbold was a publisher of one of the sporting papers).
50,000 cartes of Sayers were reportedly sold around the
time of his fi ght. Newbold’s treatment of Sayers is an
early example of how photography was used to allow
a working-class fi gure like Sayers to achieve a populist
prominence.
The case of Tom Sayers is paralleled by the situation
of General Tom Thumb in America. In the 1860s, in
addition to their Civil War work, Brady and his studio
photographers continued to take many distinguished
fi gures. One celebrity subject was General Tom Thumb:
numerous carte-de-visites were taken by Brady’s studio
to both commemorate and commercially exploit his
lavish wedding in 1863. The diminutive Tom Thumb,
born Charles Stratton in Connecticut, had been initially
discovered and exhibited by P.T. Barnum. However by
the early 1860s, Thumb had split with Barnum and or-
ganised his own tours and exhibitions, consequently also
taking control of the lucrative trade in his carte-de-vis-
ites. Thumb’s decision, like that of Sayers,’ epitomizes
the growing self-consciousness towards the value of
celebrity portraiture.
If the celebrity carte was characterised by its prolif-
eration into the drawing room through the photographic
album, a corresponding effect of such insinuation was a
heightened awareness of the intrusive properties of the
camera. The camera was already disreputably associ-
ated with a more intrusive form of celebrity. A series of
engagement cartes of the Prince of Wales and Princess
Alexandra, taken in November 1862 by the Belgian pho-
tographers, the Ghemàr Frères, exemplify the tension
aroused by the camera’s double form of permeability.
Frères’s engagement cartes depict the affections of the
affi anced couple and several of the photographs show
Edward or Alexandra standing with their arms resting
lovingly on the shoulders of the other. These displays of
intimacy were far removed from the formality of a state
portrait and were found to be distasteful by some com-
mentators. There was discomfort over having the life
of the monarchy constituted to such an extent through
the camera. As the London Review put it “whether it
be joy or grief affecting the royal family, in some way
the lens of the camera appears to spy into it in the most
offensive manner.. .these sacred feelings are turned to
commercial account” (“The Medley of Portrait Cards,”
London Review 20 June 1863: 658).
Although the rage for carte-de-visite lasted only until
the mid 1860s, photography played an increasingly
dominant role in the constitution of celebrity. The advent
of photo-journalism helped to exacerbate the spectacle
of large public occasions. Increasingly high prices were
paid for the rights to photograph celebrities. In 1880,
Napoleon Sarony, probably the second most notable
American celebrity photographer after Brady, famously
paid Sarah Bernhardt $1500 for permission to shoot her
while on her tour of America. Sarony was renowned for
his portraits of theatrical performers working on the New
York stage, and in 1882 was involved in a landmark legal
case involving the piracy of a photograph he had taken
of Oscar Wilde. By the end of the nineteenth-century, the
growth of the popular entertainment industry, in both Eu-
rope and America, meant that the celebrity photograph
was well-established. The growing ability to reproduce
photographs in periodicals and newspapers also meant
that these pictures received greater circulation. In the
1890s, for example, the Strand had a regular article on
“Photographs of Celebrities at Different Times of their
Lives.” By the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee
in 1897, the ability of photography to disseminate im-
ages of public fi gures was even offi cially recognised. An
offi cial photographic portrait, taken by W & D Downey,
was sanctioned for the fi rst time. The key point about the
Diamond Jubilee photograph is that it was deliberately