I learned in a photography class at Barnard that early photography began to flourish among the masses with the adoption of portraiture by the middle class in the mid-1800s. Disderí, the European photographer who became famous for photographing the masses, created small photos of people called carte de visite that were more accessible to the middle class. He was often contrasted with other photographers who only photographed the rich. The professor argued that the middle class used photography as a statement of their status and as a way of self-fashioning. We, the students in the class, were prompted to inquire as to what the subjects of photographs were trying to say. Most of the photographs we looked at in this class were not created by black Americans nor did they feature people of color.
