‘From today painting is dead!’ was how French artist Paul Delaroche greeted, horrified, one of the earliest photographs. It wasn’t, but celebrating photography’s 150th anniversary in 1989, the Observer explored how this ‘miraculous new invention’ changed our ways of seeing.
Cartes de visite – among the earliest affordable mass imagery – challenge the cliché of Victorian photography. Rather than a bewhiskered paterfamilias in his Sunday best, rigid and unsmiling as required by long exposures, they display surprising diversity and a taste for sensation. Alexandra, Princess of Wales, gives her daughter a piggyback; a bare-bottomed boy gets smacked; there are giants, severed heads, bearded children, chimney sweeps and celebrities.
