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Geoffrey Batchen

self and family was regarded as a sign of financial and social success and of moraland intellectual character. The more successful studios ran over two floors andincluded reception areas (in which previous work was displayed) as well as theactual shooting room, offices, and rooms for the production and mounting of thephotographs. The public rooms tended to be exotically decorated and offereda variety of painted backdrops and props for customers to choose from. All thisparaphernalia made having one’s picture taken an event that was out of theordinary. Suitably inspired, a customer could act out, within a standard format,a number of different poses (usually full-length body) and then choose the onehe or she preferred. Compared to earlier processes such as the daguerreotype,this vastly increased the degree of theatricality and control that the customerhad over his or her final image. Thus mobilized, this customer could appear aseight different people, or as eight different versions of themselves, all during theone sitting. As a consequence, the power of creation was transferred from thephotographer, who was often no more than an operator behind a fixed camera,to the subject, who got to make all sorts of choices about how they wished toappear.More accurately, the authorship of carte portraits came to be a fluid affairin which both photographer and subject had an active part. The subject wasable to ‘choose an attitude beforehand’, as one contemporary put it, but thesechoices were in large part limited to a system of established conventions andconstraints – some technical, some cultural, and some social – which were firmlyconveyed to the client by the actions and advice of the photographer. 5 Thatclients didn’t always take this advice is evidenced by the sign that hung in thestudio of London-based photographer John Edwin Mayall: ‘sitters are requestedto place themselves as much as possible in the hands of the artist’ (Wichardand Wichard 1999: 26). Given the relatively perfunctory time dedicated to thesitting, the taking of a serviceable portrait represented a particular challenge forthis artist. According to Disdéri, ‘one must be able to deduce who the subject is,to deduce spontaneously his character, his intimate life, his habits; the photog-rapher must do more than photograph, he must “biographe”’. Disdéri’s variousself-promotional publications stressed the need for the photographer to capture‘the language of the physiognomy, the expression of the look’, encouraging thesubject to take on the contradictory challenge of a ‘natural pose’. 6 CorneliusJabez Hughes defined his own priorities more narrowly in an 1859 book, ThePrinciples and Practice of Photography . ‘The primary object should be to producea characteristic likeness, and the second one to render it as pleasing as possibleby judicious selection of the view of the face and the pose of the figure, so as,without sacrificing character, to bring out the good points and conceal the lessfavorable ones.’ 7 Let us look at one or two of these portraits more closely. A man dressed inwhite trousers and a handsome frock coat stands in a shallow space, eyes andbody turned slightly away from the camera. His left hand rests on the back ofan ornate chair while his right holds a black top hat to his side. A sumptuously-