Cartes de visite of the "near and dear" and the "great and good" literally and figuratively allowed Northern viewers to picture themselves as part of the nation.
Cartes de visite, a forerunner of sorts to trading cards, featured images of famous military and political figures and other celebrities, such as actors, as well as ordinary soldiers and civilians.
The typical carte de visite was a photograph of one or a few people, posing in a studio, and occasionally holding personal effects.
Ellsworth's image became an emblem of the first collective loss of the war, which created an audience (and market) for his carte de visite as a memento of shared grief.
His invention expanded the socioeconomic reach of photographic portraiture and led to carte mania in France and England; between 1860 and 1862, Daniel says, an estimated three million to four million carte de visites of Queen Victoria were sold.
Supporting material includes uncut cartes de visite, an example of the photo albums designed for their display, and, most usefully, three computers on which you can flip page by page through digital facsimiles of 11 of the albums in the show.
The portrait for the carte-de-visite of Sojourner Truth, the African-American abolitionist and women's rights advocate, was taken in Battle Creek, Mich., in the 1860s (Slide 5).
Not coincidentally the most memorable pictures in the exhibition include daguerreotypes, like the ones of Walt Whitman, Barnum and Samuel F. B. Morse, and other famous photographs, like Brady's carte-de-visite of Lincoln.
Merchants sold carte de visites of Mrs. Ricks by famed London photographers Elliott & Fry.
The exhibit includes two carte-de-visites of Frederick Douglass, the revered abolitionist; one from 1889 is autographed — the museum's first signed Douglass photograph.
