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With the advent of the collodion process came mass production and
dissemination of photographic prints. The inception of these visual
documents of personal and public history engendered vast changes
in people's perception of history, of time, and of themselves. The
concept of privacy was greatly altered as cameras were used to record
most areas of human life. The ubiquitous presence of photographic
machinery eventually changed humankind's sense of what was suitable
for observation. The photograph was considered incontestable proof
of an event, experience, or state of being.
To fulfill the mounting and incessant demand for more images, photographers
spread out to every corner of the world, recording all the natural
and manufactured phenomena they could find. By the last quarter
of the 19th cent. most households could boast respectable photographic
collections. These were in three main forms: the family album, which
contained cabinet portraits and the smaller cartes-de-visite and
tintypes; scrapbooks containing large prints of views from various
parts of the world; and boxes of stereoscope cards, which in combination
with the popular stereo viewer created an effective illusion of
three-dimensionality.
A number of photographers, including Timothy O'Sullivan, J. K.
Hillers, and W. H. Jackson, accompanied exploratory expeditions
to the new frontiers in the American West, while John Thomson returned
from China and Maxime Du Camp from Egypt with records of vistas
and peoples never before seen by Western eyes. Roger Fenton, who
photographed the Crimean conflict, and Mathew Brady's photographic
corps, who documented the American Civil War, provided graphic evidence
of the hellishness of combat.
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