"Social Currency"
A Domestic History of the Portrait Photograph in the United States, 1839-1889
Description:... The increasing demand of the daguerreotype, and the introduction of the cheaper ambrotype and tintype by the Civil War, however, threatened the bourgeois meaning of the portrait photograph, and a strategy of exclusion, in the form of the commercial and domestic parlor, was adopted, discouraging the many from securing their portraits. The introduction of the even cheaper carte de visite (1857) and cabinet card (1866) types of paper photographs permitted widespread exchange of photographs and their collection in albums and their display in the "artistic" parlor. With improved technology that allowed for proofs to be proffered to the consumer for approval or rejection, retouching the photographic image, coloring the portrait, and an emphasis on the artistic act of posing, the camera's ability to reveal and photograph's ability to witness was questioned. Thus the bourgeois, imitating the genteel of the eighteenth century, secured his or her place in the world.
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