Guide to the William C. Darrah Collection of Cartes-de-visite, 1860-1900

Accession number: 1989-0020H

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The Pennsylvania State University
Special Collections Library
Historical Collections and Labor Archives

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Descriptive Summary

Administrative Information

Arrangement

The collection is divided into two sub-collections, the Synoptic Series and the Photographer Series. The Synoptic Series is organized into six categories: 1) Technical: includes posing, studio properties, staging, processes, and card types; 2) Subject of images: includes agriculture, costumes, Civil War, native peoples, railroads, occupations; 3) Personalities: includes artists, composers, clergy, military personnel, political figures, actors; 4) Scenic: includes outdoor scenes, architectural subjects, cityscapes, landscapes; 5) Imprints: includes advertising, advertising art, prices, awards; 6) Photographers: includes women photographers, African-American photographers, renowned photographers, photographers with other occupations (e.g., cleric, dentist, physician, jeweler, watchmaker), photographers from other lands (e.g., Mauritius, Ceylon, Singapore, Malta, Turkey, Algeria, Tunisia, Trinidad).

The Photographer Series is organized by geographic location (U.S. states or name of country).

The Synoptic Series is organized by the six categories and arranged thereunder alphabetically by the photographer's surname.

The Photographer Series is organized by geographic location, U.S. states first then foreign countries, and arranged thereunder alphabetically by the photographer's surname.

Biographical Note

William Culp Darrah was born 12 January 12 1909, in Reading, Pa. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1931, and did graduate study there, 1931-1933. Darrah's career included instructor in botany and paleobotany, and research curator at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1934-1942; advisory editor, Chronica Botanica Co., 1939-1957; research and development engineer, Raytheon Manufacturing Co., Waltham, MA, 1942-1951; professor of biology, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pa., 1952-1974, professor emeritus, 1974-1989; Director, Adams County Public Library, 1952-1955; and research associate in paleobotany, West Virginia Geological Survey, 1974-1989.

Darrah was a member of the Botanical Society of America, Society for the History of Technology, and Adams County Historical Society (director, 1954; curator, 1959-1964). He published several books on botany ( Principles of Paleobotany, Chronica Botanica, 1939, 2nd edition, Ronald, 1960; Textbook of Paleobotany, Appleton, 1939; An Introduction to the Plant Sciences, Wiley, 1942; Powell of the Colorado, Princeton University Press, 1951; A Critical Review of the Pennsylvanian Floras of Eastern North America, privately printed, 1970), local history ( Pithole: The Vanished City, privately printed, 1972; Engineering at Gettysburg College, Gettysburg College, 1973), and photography Stereo Views: A History of Stereographs in America(, privately printed, 1964; An Album of Stereographs; or, Our Country Victorious and Now a Happy Home: From the Collections of William Culp Darrah and Richard Russack, Doubleday, 1977; The World of Stereographs, Darrah, 1977; Cartes de Visite in Nin[e]teenth Century Photography, Darrah, 1981; Intentions and Techniques, 1985: An Exhibition of Photographs from the Lehigh University Collection and Nineteenth Century Pennsylvania Photography as a Folk Art from the William C. Darrah Collection, Lehigh University Art Galleries, 1985); and contributed more than 125 articles to science and history journals. Darrah traveled throughout France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and in the eastern United States doing geological fieldwork. He maintained a large cross-indexed research collection of stereographs. He died 20 May 1989.

Scope and Content

The carte-de-visite was the most influential and diverse type of photograph produced between 1860 and 1900. Virtually every studio in the world adopted this format, resulting in a dramatic transformation of the business and profession of photography. Within a single decade, the 1860s, carte-de-viste photography invaded every aspect of daily life and placed the photographic image on a par with the printed word.

The William C. Darrah Collection includes 62,608 cartes-de-visite. It was assembled systematically over a period of more than thirty years (1957-1988) by Mr. Darrah. Collecting was initiated in 1954 as part of a project to document, through examination of actual imprinted images, the existence of as many nineteenth-century photographers as possible. Darrah chose to collect the carte format because daguerreotypes and ambrotypes (1840-1860) were seldom imprinted or signed.

Acquisitions were of two types: (1) the purchase of select cartes to illustrate technical and aesthetic aspects of carte-de-visite photography, and (2) the purchase of random lots of 100-2,000 cartes from sources in twenty-eight states in order to achieve the widest geographic representation feasible.

The quantity and diversity of U.S. photographers represented in the collection may be judged by the following breakdown, representing the U.S. states with the most cartes in the collection and the U.S. states with the most photographers in the collection. The U.S. states with the greatest number of cartes-de-visite in the Photographer Series are Massachusetts (11,200), New York (7,300), Pennsylvania (4,600), Illinois (3,300), Ohio (2,800), New Hampshire (1,800), Connecticut (1,650), Maine (1,550), Michigan (1,200), Iowa (1,050), Wisconsin (1,000), New Jersey (850), Indiana (800), California (600), Rhode Island (550); nine states had fewer than 25 each.

The U.S. states with the greatest number of photographers represented in the Photographer Series are New York (2,175), Pennsylvania (2,035), Illinois (1,400), Ohio (1,285), Massachusetts (1,230), Iowa (670), Michigan (560), Wisconsin (485), California (475), Missouri (340), Maine (340), Kansas (320), New Hampshire (300), Vermont (270), Minnesota (260); six states have fewer than twelve each.

There are 3,600 cartes-de-visite representing the work of 2,700 photographers from countries other than the United States. Countries with the greatest number of cartes in the collection include: Great Britain, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Denmark, Austria, and Switzerland.

Darrah compiled eleven separate card files to index the collection: 1) Photographer, 2) Geographic (U.S. and Canada), 3) Geographic (foreign), 4) Technical, 5) Subject, 6) Personalities, 7) Scenic, 8) Imprint, 9) Photographer Topical, 10) Synoptic, 11) Locality (U.S. and Canada). These indexes are available in-house. A separate database identifying and describing each image is also available in-house. Online indexes (not contained in the PDF print version) to images sort them alphabetically by photographer, and geographically.

Index Terms

These materials are indexed under the following headings in the catalog of the Pennsylvania State University. Researchers wishing to find related materials should search the catalog under these index terms.

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