The Carte de Visite and Domestic Digital Photography

What is it about?

This article takes the most popular form of nineteenth-century photograph, the carte de visite, and places it in conversation with twenty-first-century vernacular digital photography. This approach reveals the compilers of nineteenth-century photo albums to be just as concerned with quotidian social communication as with the creation of visual archives for future memorialising. Twenty-first-century creators of domestic digital images, by contrast, are shown to be engaging with the increasing mnemonic potential of digital image archives.

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