Carte de visite featuring a portrait of Robert Browning, priced £50 from Paul Frecker.
Published this month, Cartomania: Photography and Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century (September Publishing, £40) also serves as reflection of his role in the market.
“Nearly all the photographs in the book are from my own collection,” he says. “A few are cartes de visite that I sold at some point in the past, but retained scans of. A few more were sourced from institutions and other collectors. About 10 came from the National Portrait Gallery.”
French photographer André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri patented the carte de visite in 1854. It was a small photographic image mounted on a thick piece of paper. Created as a method for portraiture, it was not until Disdéri published photos of Napoleon III that it became a sensation. The aristocracy were first to embrace the medium, seeking out photographers to assist in this new fashion, fuelling a booming niche industry.
“It would be difficult to exaggerate the popularity of the carte de visite when it was first introduced at the beginning of the 1860s,” says Frecker in the book.
“The format enjoyed a mass appeal of such epidemic proportions that for a while at least it eclipsed all other forms of photographic production.
“Innumerable articles in the photographic press soon trumpeted its ascendancy and the craze for collecting these miniature portraits was eventually dubbed ‘Cartomania’ by cultural commentators.” Prior to becoming a photo dealer, Frecker developed a successful career as a fashion stylist in the ‘80s, contributing to magazines such as i-D and The Face, before progressing to TV commercials and music videos in the ‘90s.
“My career was going fine and I was shooting all over the world, but I was feeling less and less fulfilled by the work I was doing,” he says. In 2001 he chanced on an album of cartes de visite in Alfie’s Antique Market on Church Street, north-west London.
“I didn’t buy the album immediately. I had no frame of reference, but I thought it was overpriced. Then I went away on holiday to Mexico but I kept thinking about the light on the sitter’s hair in one particular portrait in the album.
“So when I got home from the holiday, I went back in to Alfie’s and bought the album. Luckily it was still there. If someone else had bought it in the meantime, my life wouldn’t have taken the turn it did.”
Portrait of Princess Louise of Wales, later Princess Royal and Duchess of Fife, available for £25 from Paul Frecker.
Freckler started collecting cartes de visite and using eBay to sell those he didn’t want to keep. “There was, in fact, a two-year overlap before I decided that I was making enough money as a photo dealer to kick the other career into touch,” he says.
“There really wasn’t anything cavalier about it. The one career gradually took over from the other. Much to my relief, as I was really at the end of my tether as far as the styling was concerned.”
Since departing the world of fashion, Frecker deals in all formats of paper-based photography, both 19th and 20th century. “I started dealing as a means to end, since building a collection necessitates being in the right place at the right time, and being a dealer, I could get into all the photo fairs early, when the dealers were stalling out.”
Royal approval
The book features portraits of historical characters such as Queen Victoria, who was an early adopter of the medium, and the work of the photographer Nadar, who helped bring the method to the mainstream.
Does Frecker have a favourite? “One of my favourites is a self portrait by a polar photographer called Johnny Grant. He was unidentified when I found him, with only a very discreet backplate on the reverse of the mount that didn’t include his name, just a family crest and a family motto. But I nevertheless managed to identify him and had my identification confirmed by the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam.”
Frecker completed an MA in Victorian studies at Birkbeck and then noticed a gap in the market, which inspired him to publish this book. “As I learned more and more about cartes de visite, I realised that no-one had written the definitive British history yet, certainly not one that was illustrated. In 2009 I had an article on Camille Silvy (my favourite photographer) published in the journal History of Photography and that was the catalyst that led me to write more.”
