Carte de Visite

The carte de visite — literally “visiting card” — was a small albumen photograph mounted on a card, about the size of a playing card. Patented by the Paris photographer Disdéri in 1854, it made portrait photography cheap for the first time: eight exposures on one plate, cut apart and sold for pennies.

Suddenly everyone could own pictures — of family, of celebrities, of royalty. Collecting cartes became “cardomania”: albums filled with actors, politicians, and pretty strangers, traded like baseball cards. For the first time, ordinary people saw what famous faces actually looked like.

It fascinates as the birth of photographic celebrity culture. The like, the follow, and the selfie were invented more than 150 years ago in a Paris studio.