The Filson Historical Society Digital Projects

The Cabinet Card

999PC21_129_A.jpg

Unidentified portrait by Paul Gunter

By the 1870s, the carte-de-visite was waning in popularity, and photographers were looking for something bigger and better. Drawing on the same technology as the carte-de-visite, the cabinet card was invented. Double the size of a CDV, the cabinet card measured 4 ¼” x 6 ½” and utilized a two-lens camera instead of the previous four, creating two larger photographs. This larger format allowed photographers to be more creative with their portraits over the next three decades. Most early cabinet cards started off simple, very similar to the carte-de-visite. But as the fad progressed, photographers added more elaborate foregrounds and backgrounds and began incorporating props and costumes to the images to add pizzazz and often a theatrical touch. Most people thought of their portraits as simple one-and-done sittings, so photographers had to convince the public that the medium offered more creative possibilities. Most people considered photography was one and done—so photographers had to convince the public that this was more about capturing a moment.

Louisville photographer Paul Gunter entered the local portrait photography scene during the peak of cabinet cards in the late 1880s. Coming from a long line of photographers, Gunter immigrated from Germany to the United States in 1886, probably with the goal of opening his own photographic studio. Gunter first appears in the Louisville City Directories in 1887, listed as an artist for Stuber and Bro., a studio owned by prominent Louisville German photographer Paul Stuber, located at 616 East Chestnut. The term “artist” often referred to photograph re-toucher.

Re-touching was a very important part of pre-processing a photograph prior to printing and mounting the image. Due to their size, these large format negatives could easily be doctored by photo “artists” like Gunter to eliminate a subject’s blemishes, wrinkles, stray hairs, and even sometimes a few pounds, giving a slenderer appearance. Re-touchers could also add a foreground and background after the fact by deploying custom cutouts, adding masks or boarders, or printing multiple negatives on top of each other. They even had the ability to superimpose props into an image later if a studio couldn’t afford real ones. These early image re-touchers were the precursor to modern-day photo editing software such as Photoshop.