History is amazing! How often our humanity repeats itself…
History of portrait photography and adoption after Civil War
It’s interesting how historical analogy can inspire creative ideas, solutions or direction for work today.
One day, I came across a history of portrait photography, and was fascinated to learn that photo portraits only became widespread in the 19th century after invention of the daguerreotype method… a quick, portable, and cost-effective preservation of keepsake-pictures which took photography out of the inventor’s studio and into the marketplace.
author’s distant relative in daguerrotype case
To meet expanding demand, photographers expanded business by traveling from town-to-town, setting up temporary portrait studios in saloons and local inns.
Today’s swelling interest of business professionals for online video is an interesting parallel to its distant Victorian era cousin, portrait photography. Online video is an important business priority, since search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo first started crawling video sharing sites in 2006. Traditional brand marketing is no longer a silver bullet, especially since most our our prospects and consumers are on-the-go 24×7, quite interested in using smartphones to find everything whenever they need it.
Daguerreotype was eventually replaced by other methods, but portrait photography remained popular. Somewhat a status symbol, photo portraits were invaluable for families, providing an exact picture of loved ones, especially after so many were lost during The Civil War.
“The image produced “directly” by nature, bypassing the intervention of the hand of the artist, was the object of amazement at first, and praised for its astounding fidelity of detail: an “art form” therefore that “no painter could ever match”.
Another similarity is how portrait photos alone weren’t the only value…frames and casings drew attention, the finer cases creating impressions about the person in the portrait. Similarly, professionally produced video generates higher results for business professionals, with motion graphics complementing the message, branding and calls-to-action.
arrive, relax, be authentic and… present yourself.