Portret van Reginald Carter als kind c. 1865 - 1875

This is a mounted carte-de-visite showing three portraits of Reginald Carter as a child. Photography was still a relatively new technology in the 19th century, and this album hints at how photography was used to shape identity. In Victorian society, the ability to commission portraits signified a certain level of social standing. The fact that this image exists in an album, alongside other similar images of Carter, indicates the way that families like the Carters constructed and recorded their histories. The portraits themselves are carefully staged. The children are dressed in their best clothes and posed in a way that conveys respectability and decorum. As a historian, I’m interested in how this portrait participates in the visual culture of its time, and in the institutional forces that shape the production and consumption of images like this one. Accessing family records and historical archives would allow for a more complete picture of the image's social history.