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to the family photographic albums fl owed from the high-
est levels of society. The British Royal family retained
the services a group of photographers, known as the
photographers to the Queen, to create carte-de-visites
and cabinet cards to which they added the images of their
possessions as well as the cartes and cabinet cards given
them by distinguished visitors—an undertaking that
would eventually yield 110 albums containing more than
100,000 images. John Mayall’s publication of fourteen
photographs of the Royal Family in a carte-de-visite
album in 18602 clearly infl uenced the Victorian public’s
demand for family photographic albums of their own.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were also respon-
sible for the popularity of the stereoscope, an instru-
ment that, thanks to their endorsement at the Great
Exhibition of 1851, quickly became a household item
throughout Europe and North America. Between 1854
and 1856, the London Stereoscopic Company sold two
million stereoscope viewers—this before Oliver Wen-
dell Holmes designed and placed in the public domain
the archetypal nineteenth century stereoscope device.
By the early 1860s, the most successful of the British,
American and French stereoscope companies were each
selling nearly one million stereographs (stereo cards)
per year. Before the interest in stereography faded in
the early twentieth century, some two to fi ve million
different stereograph images would be produced in the
United States alone.
Stereographs, like the carte-de-visites, tintypes,
ambrotypes, cabinet cards and, after the mid-1870s, a
new generation of gas and oil powered magic lanterns,
brought an ever accelerating profusion of imagery into
the nineteenth century home. They also spawned a
global industry, as tens of thousands of photographers
worked to fi ll the catalogues of hundreds of suppliers. In
1861, Paris alone supported some 33,000 photographers
and other workers in the photography industry.
Among the intellectual leaders of the time, the re-
sponse to this rapid infl ux of visual imagery was shaped
by the era’s deeply held belief in technological progress.
Holmes, for instance, in his June 1859 Atlantic Monthly
article, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” called
for the creation of stereograph museums as a means
of documenting the nineteenth century world. Others
advocated the large-scale photography of works of
classical art as a means of not only preserving the art
but also spreading appreciation of the objects to those
who would otherwise never see them. To this end, the
Alsatian photographer Adolph Braun, compiled from
1866 on, a catalogue of half a million art works avail-
able as carte-de-visites and stereographs.
Stereography and magic lanterns also contributed
to the creation of the mode of industrialized culture we
now know as “entertainment.” Increasingly elaborate
stereograph and lantern slide sets introduced viewers to
the basic strategies of visual storytelling they would see
after 1895 in early cinema and well after that in home
movies and television.
The net effect of this infl ux of photography into the
nineteenth century home was a coupling of the public
and private spheres, as families repeated, through their
assembly of images, the acquisitive agenda of the indus-
trial, imperial world. In their albums, boxes and draw-
ers and on their walls, families collected the images of
industrial wonders, national landmarks and conquering
heroes. They also collected the stereotyped images of
non-western peoples and “exotic” locales. Women too
were commodifi ed as the fi rst wave of mass produced
erotic imagery was brought into the home and locked
away for discreet viewing by the patriarch and his confi -
dants—and indeed, as Malek Alloula has demonstrated,
Orientalism and erotic photography often complemented
one another. Even the photography of classical art
proceeded according to the reverence for ancient and
Renaissance artistic practices and, conversely, with a
deep distrust of contemporary work.
In contrast to the overwhelming infl ux of commercial
imagery into the nineteenth home, the production of do-
mestic photography by family members themselves was
a small and slowly evolving practice. William Henry
Fox Talbot’s conception of photography as a tool for
recording one’s immediate surroundings was practiced
only in a relatively few upper middle class households.
However, despite its inaccessibility—and the dangers
of working with early photo chemicals—early pho-
tography did become an acceptable domestic craft for
women, some of whom chose to transcend the pursuit
of purely domestic subjects and apply their skills to
scientifi c and artistic goals. Victorian mores also al-
lowed for women to work alongside their husbands
in portrait studios and, to a lesser extent, to maintain
studios of their own.
Domestic photography advanced slowly with Freder-
ick Scott Archer’s invention of collodion, the publication
of countless photography manuals and, after 1853, the
growth of photographic societies. There also remained
the ideal of a more accessible photographic technology,
as exemplifi ed by the several failed attempts to simplify
the medium, e.g. Adolphe Bertsch’s 1860 chambre noire
automatique, J.B. Spenser and A.J. Melhuish roll paper
fi lm in 1854, and the slightly more practical design by
Leon Warnecke in 1875. But perhaps the most optimistic
gesture in the direction of amateur photography was John
Herschel’s coining of the term “snapshot” in 1860.
The reality was that for most middle-class families,
prior to 1880, amateur photography remained an unaf-
fordable and daunting process. Photographers were
required to mix their own chemicals for both taking and
developing images, a process that was not only diffi cult
but which also made for inconsistent results. What were