Civil War Collage

Photography and Media

c. 1860/70

Maker unknown

Around the time of the Civil War, cartes de visite—small, inexpensive studio portraits—became extremely popular among middle-class Americans. Cartes were traded, kept in albums, and occasionally cut and pasted to form personalized collages. This is an unusual example of a portrait collage in that it implies a family tree, with layers of photographs clustered at the bottom and hierarchical rows at the top. It is possible that the composition focuses on a Union soldier, his commanding officers, and his family. If so, the work represents a transition from textual record keeping, such as lists of births and deaths, to a new visual narrative of family history, whether kept in an album or framed on the wall.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Photography and Media

Artist: Unknown
Title: Civil War Collage
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: Made 1855–1875
Medium: Photocollage (albumen prints)
Dimensions: Image/ paper: 33.4 × 30.7 cm (13 3/16 × 12 1/8 in.)
Credit Line: Ernest N. Kahn Photography Fund
Reference Number: 2010.318
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/204013/manifest.json

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