The Beautiful and the Damned The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Photography

The Beautiful and the Damned looks for the first time at the broad social and cultural context for the development of portrait photography in the nineteenth century, showing how social and celebrity portraiture on the one hand, and scientific photography on the other, were different facets of the nineteenth-century fascination with classification and ordering. Between 1860 and 1900, editions of celebrity portraits, as well as the vogue for the carte de visite, fuelled the fashion for collecting and classifying photographs of the face. In an age of rapid industrialisation and the growth of the middle classes, the carte de visite became a means of conferring social status, and family albums - which often incorporated photographs of royalty and public figures - were used to position family members within society at large.