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Well, it has finally arrived, the book that carte de visite collectors have been expecting all their lives.

CARTOMANIA by Paul Frecker (September Publishing, 2024) is a thumping good read – 474 pages and over 500 wonderful illustrations. Frecker calls it a labour of love, but it is so much more. The text is written with dry humour and evident expertise, amply quoting the sort of documentation you would find, perhaps, in the British Library after many months, or even years of arduous searching. Indeed, this marvellous tome brings to light a world of evidence from period journals and newspapers to chart the spectacular rise and the eventual fall of the gleaming star which brought photography to the general public, altering and moulding tastes and habits as no earlier photographic process had done. I was particularly impressed by the chapters and illustrations relating to Death and Mourning, Copyright and Piracy, and Origins, but there are chapters for all, paying careful attention to Photographers, The Sitting, Royalty, Courtesans, Armchair Travellers, and so on. The illustrations are taken from the extensive and extraordinary collection of the author, which ought to be preserved for the nation.

While waiting for the nation to wake up, buy the book!

In our contemporary image-saturated, comprehensively mediated way of life it is difficult for us to understand how "sensational" photography would have been in the Victorian era. Imagine never having seen a photograph of a landscape, city or person before. To then be suddenly presented with a image written in light, fixed before the eye of the beholder, would have been a profoundly magical experience for the viewer. Here was a new, progressive reality imaged for all to see. The society of the spectacle as photograph had arrived.

Here was the expansion of scopophilic society, our desire to derive pleasure from looking. That fetishistic desire can never be completely fulfilled, so we have to keep looking again and again, constantly reinforcing the ocular gratification of images. Photographs became shrines to memory. They also became shrines to the memory of desire itself.

Dr Marcus Bunyan for Art Blart

See the full posting here: http://wp.me/pn2J2-7oK

Photography - A Victorian Sensation shows at the National Museum of Scotland until 22 November. 

Ross and Thomson of Edinburgh
Unknown little girl sitting on a striped cushion holding a framed portrait of a man, possibly her dead father
1847-60
Ninth-plate daguerreotype
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland