Andre-Adolphe Eugene Disderi (carte-de-visite)

Born March 28, 1819, Paris, France. He was a french photographer noted for his popularization of the carte-de-visite, a small albumen print mounted on a 2¹/₂ × 4 inch (6 × 10.2 cm) card and used as a calling card. Although Disdéri sought a career in the arts, the death of his father obligated him to turn to the business world to support first his mother and siblings and then his own wife, Geneviève Elizabeth Francart, and his children. He left Paris for the city of Brest, in western France, during the Revolution of 1848. There, with his wife, he opened a photographic studio and made daguerreotypes. Leaving his wife to manage the Brest studio, he moved to Nîmes and began to use the recently developed wet collodion process for a variety of subjects in addition to portraits. These included picturesque groups of beggars and ragpickers and less artistic shots of athletes and labourers. He moved back to Paris as owner of the largest photography studio in the city. Living here and because of how big his studio was he was prompted to invent a method of using a single camera with four lenses and a divided septum to produce multiple portraits on a single plate.