Carte-de-visite: the photographic portrait as ‘social media’
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Tuesday 9 May 2023
(6-7pm) - The Art Workers’ Guild, 6 Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 3AT
- Lecturer: Patrizia di Bello
‘The demand for photographs is not limited to relations or friends. […] Anyone who has seen you, or has seen anybody that has seen you, or knows anyone that says he has seen a person who thought he had seen you, considers himself entitled to ask you for your photograph’ (Anon, ‘Fashions’, Saturday Review, 1862)
This lecture explores the boom in carte-de-visite portraits in the 1860s: their value, uses and abuses as personal memento and, at the same time, a visual currency for exchange in fashionable Society and celebrity culture.
The lecture will be followed by a glass of wine which will give members the opportunity to discuss the lecture with other members and the lecturer.
Lecturer
Patrizia Di Bello is Professor of History and Theory of Photography at Birkbeck, University of London, where she co-directs the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre and looks after the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive. She is editor-in-chief of History of Photography. She has written on different aspects of women’s engagement with photography as practitioners, collectors and writers, from Julia Margaret Cameron to Ana Mendieta and Jo Spence. Her publications Sculptural Photographs from The Calotype to Digital Technologies (Bloomsbury 2017), The Photobook from Talbot to Ruscha (IB Tauris, 2012), edited with Colette Wilson and Shamoon Zamir, and Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian Britain: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts (Ashgate 2007).
Completed