Napoléon Coste

In 1854 the Parisian photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri introduced a method for producing multiple images on a single glass-plate negative. He also produced more portable studio portrait format: the carte-de-visite, which consists of a small portrait mounted on rigid paper stock about the size of a business card. The uncut contact sheet displayed here features eight different views of a single sitter. It comes from a reference album that Disdéri kept in his studio for reprint requests. The irreversible discolor-ation along the edges of the print was caused primarily by humidity, which penetrated the pages of the closed album over the years.