Category: Photography, English, Portraits, Yale University, United States, Connecticut
Results
The carte-de-visite, usually an albumen paper photograph mounted on a heavy paper card measuring 2½ × 4 inches, flourished in popularity between 1860 and the 1880s. The Carl Mautz collection of cartes-de-visite photographs created by California photographers includes 145 images consisting chiefly of portraits depicting children, women, and men, in single and group sittings and various ethnic and cultural backgrounds, including Asian American and African Americans. The portraits also include persons with unique physical features, including midgets, dwarves, and giants as well as butchers, circus performers, freemason, miners, musicians, sailors, and soldiers.
American photographer Robert Giard is renowned for his portraits of American poets and writers; his particular focus was on gay and lesbian writers. Some of his photographs of the American gay and lesbian literary community appear in his groundbreaking book Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers , published by MIT Press in 1997. Giard’s stated mission was to define the literary history and cultural identity of gays and lesbians for the mainstream of American society, which perceived them as disparate, marginal individuals possessing neither. In all, he photographed more than 600 writers. The archive is a unique and important collection providing a significant resource for the study of literary America in the late twentieth century.
