From actresses and opera singers in nineteenth-century albumen cartes-de-visite to Andy Warhol’s sitters in Polaroids of the 1970s and 1980s, the women portrayed in these small photographs are presented at the peak of their fame. With the advent of the carte-de-visite, an inexpensive format on the scale of visiting cards developed in the late 1850s, it became popular to collect celebrity portraits. There was a certain intimacy to owning and handling such images, as is clear from an anecdote about Fanny Brown, an actress better recognized after her picture was discovered on John Wilkes Booth after his death in 1865. These nineteenth-century photographs of famous women, most identified through hand-written inscriptions, others now forgotten, offer a window on what was, in many cases, a brief period between a birth into poverty and a return to it by the time of their deaths. Warhol’s informal and instant portraits depict celebrities near their pinnacle: Dorothy Hamill the year after winning a gold medal in figure skating at the 1976 Olympics, Rosalynn Carter just before becoming first lady of the United States in 1977, and Kitty D’Alessio when she was president of Chanel in the 1980s.

Elaine Mehalakes
Kemper Curator of Academic Programs