Antique Cartes-De-Visite Photographs
Carte-de-visite, or CDV, is French for "visiting card" or calling card. That's because when a French daguerreotypist named André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri patented a method for exposing multiple negatives onto a single plate in 1854, the resulting 2 1/2- by 4-inch albumen prints were intended to replace conventional calling cards, which only displayed the bearer's name and other printed information. Disdéri's CDVs, which were made of thin paper...Continue Reading