[Califorina]: Rulofson, William Herman: Bradley, Henry William:

$1,250 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

MEN OF MARK [with:] BRADLEY & RULOFSON'S CELEBRITIES [caption titles]. An exceptionally uncommon pair of cartes mosaique by the San Francisco photography studio of Bradley and Rulofson, with "Celebrities" showing the heads of over one hundred actors and actresses of the period, while "Men of Mark" depicts a similar number of statesmen, noblemen, artists, authors, and soldiers from across the world. Bradley and Rulofson's cartes mosaiques were based on the of French photographer André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri's carte-de-visite mosaique, patented in 1863, which involved taking photographic prints, cutting out the various people in the pictures, and placing the cutout figures alongside, above, and below each other, allowing the photographer to combine the portraits of two or three people up to a thousand and sell them to the public for the same price as they would usually pay for the carte of a single person, thus making it even more affordable for the public to own photographic portraits of their favorite celebrities. By combining many images on a single card (far more than did Disdéri), Bradley and Rulofson created a dense and richly varied composition that pushed the boundaries of photographic art; their work is often seen as a precursor to the later development of photomontage in the art world.Bradley and Rulofson's "Celebrities" carte mosaique was described as "A photographic gem, in the shape of a group of 110 of the more celebrated actors and actresses…and every head stands

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