Buenos Aires portraits. Buenos Aires, circa 1870.

Set of four albumen portraits in carte-de-visite format. Measurements, around 9 x 6 cm / 3.54 x 2.36 in. Two of them with a wet stamp on the back: “Fotografía del Porvenir de Félix Pozzo - Calle Piedad 992 - Buenos Aires”, and the other two with printed advertising. 

The group is a magnificent display of the various modalities in which the small carte-de-visite portraits were presented. Here in a set of four images of great technical quality, all executed by the same artist. The three adults with faded half-length poses -among them, the woman, hierarchized by the embossed system known as "porcelain type"- while the girl, standing on the pose chair, leans on the well-known balustrade. All are immobilized by the nape hooks to face the long seconds of immobility, required for the shot. Red was the color of Pozzo and the lithographic engraving of the temple of Nuestra Señora de Balvanera -the only one inaugurated by Juan Manuel de Rosas- is of a striking quality. Of the best Buenos Aires iconography of the XIX century, stamped on the back of two of the secondary supports.

Around 1860, the photographic format invented by André Disdéri of Paris finally landed in Buenos Aires and was all the rage in the world. We refer to the one known as "Carte-de-visite" in French; that small cardboard of only 9 x 6 cm. It was obtained through a four-lens camera thanks to which customers received a total of 12 portraits in different poses. This fashion  which gave birth to the photographic album- was adopted by all the portraitists of the time and the Italian Felix Pozzi (1835 - ?) was no exception. His studio on Piedad street (current Bartolomé Miter) first in 759 and later in number 992, was established in the mid-1870s under the names of "Fotografía del Porvenir" and with the renumbering, "Balvanera Photography". His house was a meeting point for the large Italian community; the ladies attended in their dressing room by the photographer's wife, Angela Muratorio, and all received in their mother tongue.

Abel alexander President of the Ibero-American Society for the History of Photography

BLM