Portret van een onbekende vrouw 1881

This is a photograph of an unknown woman, made by the Cordes Brothers in the Netherlands. Though undated, the carte-de-visite format became extremely popular in the 1860s. Photography offered an affordable way to produce portraits and they became a popular way to produce and circulate images of both famous figures and ordinary citizens. Like painted portraits, photographic portraits offered ways to communicate status. This woman’s dress and jewelry, though modest, signal her as a member of the middle class, the key audience for photographic portraiture. The dissemination of photographic images was facilitated by institutions such as commercial photography studios, postal networks, and collecting albums. Precisely because photographs appear to offer unmediated access to the real, it is important for the historian to examine the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. Further research in archives of photography studios and postal networks, for example, might shed light on the broader social and cultural context in which images like this one circulated.