How cartomania captivated even Queen Victoria

The wife of the Victorian photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot called his first cameras ‘mousetraps’: little wooden boxes that were designed to capture anything placed before them. Yet most of Fox Talbot’s earliest photographs do not show living bodies at all. Long exposure times meant that the faintest twitch on a sitter’s face would dissolve it into a foggy blur, so instead he trained his lens on objects like shells and books, creating whole new collections he could reproduce in ghostly black and white.

Within a few years numerous other photography enthusiasts would follow his lead. In the 18th century, a tourist might return from their travels with a sculpture or a painting; now they came home with photographs. Instead of bringing back a view of Venice by Canaletto, they could produce a hundred of their own; instead of the Elgin Marbles, they could display the entire Acropolis and perch it on their mantelpiece.