Smartphone users aren’t the inventors of the photograph, though they might have amped up the number taken in any one day.
More than 150 years ago, the Civil War generation was the first to grow up with photography.
“Photography was an earth-shattering innovation in the mid-19th century, perhaps like the introduction of the computer or the cell phone,” John Cuthbert, director of the West Virginia and Regional History Center, said in a press release from West Virginia University. “It was introduced in the U.S. around 1840 and within a couple of decades people all over America were getting their pictures taken by itinerant photographers who would travel from town to town.”
WVU Libraries and the WVRHC used words and pictures to tell the story of early photography in America from 1840 to 1915 as part of a West Virginia Day program Thursday.
Ron Coddington, a leading authority regarding photography during the Civil War era, was the keynote speaker.
“During photography’s early years, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes ruled the portrait world. Then, on the eve of the Civil War, a curious new format landed in America — the carte de visite,” Coddington said in the press release before the event.
Carte de visite photographs, or CDVs, were photographs on cards roughly the size of a baseball card that were exchanged and collected among friends and family, according to WVU.
“After hostilities began, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors posed for their portraits,” Coddington said. “Countless millions of photographs were produced. Significant numbers of these most intimate and personal artifacts survive today. Some are finding a place among the iconic images of the war.”
In his talk titled, “Cardomania! How Civil War photography became the social media of the 1860s,” Coddington told the story of Civil War portrait photographs and what became of them.
Birthday festivities for the state included a continental breakfast reception in the Milano Reading Room in the Charles C. Wise Jr. Library. Coddington, author of four books of collected Civil War portraits and editor and publisher of Military Images magazine, then spoke.
An exhibit of early photographs from the WVRHC’s historical photograph collection then opened in the Center’s Davis Family Galleries. Birthday cake was served in the Downtown Campus Library Atrium.
