André Disdéri was a french photographer who in 1852 moved to Paris where he found an abundance of subjects for his cartes de visite. Cartes de visite, meaning “visiting card”, is small photograph mounted on a Card, Disdéri patented this method as his own. This method enabled photographs to be mass produced. This cards were only 6x9 cm and at the time everyone in Paris wanted them after 1859 when Disdéri published photos of Emperor Napoleon III in this format. They were traded and collected, and were usually portraits of people including prominent individnals in the 19th century. Another patent of Disdéri’s is that of finding a way to print 8 photographs on a single sheet and also he invented the twin lens reflex camera.
I think that this man seems like he was ahead of his time just enough so that he could keep giving the world new methods and ideas for photography. I see all over the internet and facebook of people puting multiple pictures of themselves of things next to each other to make one big photograph. And that is exactly what Disdéri had invented when he put 8 photos on one sheet of paper. I don’t think that people relize how much work went into inventing and evoling photography. Taking a digital picture is way too easy now days and I think that researching Disdéri has definitely made me think more about how everything we do today in photography came to be. I think that if he and many other inventors hadn’t figured out what we did we would be way behind in our photography and technology.
Yeah, it is quite easy to forget how things we take for granted today came to be. The artist I posted for the third web work, Henry Peach Robinson, was one of the first to do what you mentioned people on the internet doing. Thought you might find that interesting.
ReplyDeleteGreat summary of Disderi and a good post about digital images - it is easy to forget that there is a history that proceeds what we are doing.
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