The acceptance of the carte portrait as an item of exchange, a collectable, by the middle class and the subsequent adoption of the practice by the workers themselves represent to the insidious transformation of the individual into a malleable commodity. Direct human intercourse was in a sense supplemented by the interaction with a machine-generated and therefore irrefutably exact alter-ego, a fabricated “other.” The creation and popularization of the care de visite during the Second Empire therefore represents an early step toward the simplification of complex personalities into immediately graspable and choreographed performers whose faces rather than actions win elections.
A.A.E. Disdéri, Anne McCauley, 1985. p. 224