The affordability of the collodion processes led to the rapid expansion of portrait making. In 1841 there were only three portrait firms in London; in 1851 there were less than a dozen, but in 1861 more than 200.¹ Skilled posing, lighting, and retouching allowed photographers to push the boundaries of portraiture, expanding the enterprise of studio photography. [2|4|7|913]

One of the most highly skilled studio portrait makers was Gaspard Félix Tournachon (1820–1910), known as Nadar. Originally an acclaimed caricaturist, becoming a photographer was a natural extension of his talent for recording a subject’s essential characteristics. His ability to create stinging caricatures earned him the nickname "Tourne à dard" (one who stings), which he shortened to "Nadard" and then to "Nadar."² His studio was a meeting place for Paris’s intelligentsia, and where Nadar produced portraits of his guests: Charles Baudelaire, Alexandre Dumas, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Franz Liszt, and George Sand. Acting as an artistic director, he posed his best-known clients but relied on his staff to carry out the actual work. This arrangement was taken for granted and typifies the teamwork that went into the making of the majority of images attributed solely to most well-regarded studio photographers.³ [2|4|7|914]Additional examples:
 
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Nadar’s original approach was direct and simple, making use of plain dark backgrounds and, when possible, full natural light. Later, through the aid of reflectors, screens, veils, and mirrors, he made considerable use of side lighting to model the features of the face. Possibly influenced by his friend, Adam-Salomon, who employed unusual lighting methods and poses learned from his painter associates, Nadar positioned his sitters in such a way that often hid their hands in order to emphasize facial expressions and bodies. Favoring three-quarter views, he organized his subjects around recognizable gestures and looks that revealed the character’s essence while breaking down the sense of distance between subject and photographer. Sitters were encouraged to discover their own poses with a minimal use of props. Nadar knew his sitters, and the intimacy of the portraits, and his understanding of their often familiar human fragility, record the bonds of friendship and remembrance of shared events. Although a comrade, Nadar was not necessarily reverent: He did not flatter his sitters, but often seemed on the verge of revealing one of their secrets. His restrained portraits of French novelist George Sand unobstrusively convey her dominating personality as a literary talent and nonconformist who protested the unequal treatment of women by openly wearing trousers, smoking cigars, and taking lovers like a man. [2|4|7|915]

The subjects in many of Nadar’s portraits seem to have been participating in the act of photography rather than just undergoing it. Spontaneity was in play, often revealing a part of the sitter’s inner psychological being. Nadar understood the wet plate’s ability to render detail, but he was not obsessed with it. He knew how to suppress detail and sharpness, moving sitters through different levels of focus to bring out their essence. In his work, the sitter’s clothes were an important element of personality, used to build an atmosphere of class, ethnic, and social character previously unachieved in photography. These qualities, combined with his talent as a caricaturist, enabled Nadar to go after the "moral intelligence" of the sitter and expand the boundaries of the social portrait. [2|4|7|916]

In 1856, Nadar observed: [2|4|7|917]

Always experimenting, Nadar made the first aerial photographs in 1858, coating his wet-plate while in a hot-air balloon. In 1861 he photographed with artificial light, using Bunsen batteries in the catacombs of Paris. The failure of the revolutionary Commune of Paris financially ruined Nadar, and in 1871, he handed the business over to his son Paul (1856–1939), who continued on as a fashionable commercial portraitist through the turn of the twentieth century, photographing such notables as French writer Marcel Proust and many of those characterized in his monumental work In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927). [2|4|7|919]Additional examples:
 
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A French aristocratic and amateur photographer, Camille Silvy (1834–1910) ran a lavish London portrait studio and had a style that was the antithesis of Nadar’s. Silvy favored intricate sets of his own design, with painted backdrops creating the proper atmosphere for his upscale clients. He specialized in posing the fashionable in front of mirrors, to soften the light and to manufacture a luxurious glow that accented the sitter’s attire and hairstyle. Known for his exemplary taste and understanding of how to pose women, Silvy cultivated his reputation by publishing a series of cartes called The Beauties of England, which were acclaimed for their elegance, refinement, and vivacity. He closed his studio, which employed forty people, when the carte fad fizzled. Silvy’s photographic career, lasting just over a decade, was cut short due to health problems—associated, perhaps, with the collodion process. (In fact, Silvy’s death was probably hastened by his exposure to photographic chemicals. Numerous reports tell of early photographers being made ill or poisoned by improper handling of photographic chemicals.) [2|4|7|920]Additional examples:
 
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Antoine Samuel Adam-Salomon (1811–1881) was a Parisian sculptor who took up photography part time in 1858. Using his knowledge of modeling clay, Adam-Salomon was able to bring forth the plastic, three-dimensional effects of his two-dimensional subjects. He introduced what was called Rembrandt Lighting, the use of high side light to achieve distinct visual projection of a sitter’s face after the style of the Dutch painter. Greater facial contour enhanced the characterization of the sitter. Adam-Salomon, whose prints were known for their rich range of luxurious tones, also paid homage to painting by draping his sitters in velvet and posing them in the style of the Old Masters. [2|4|7|921]

Since his work venerated the traditions of painting it was appreciated by critics who believed the insemination of classic artistic ideas was necessary to elevate photography from a means of mechanical reproduction to an art. Yet Adam-Salomon’s work was also criticized for downplaying the individual attributes of subjects in favor of making them part of a formal configuration. In 1867–1868 he became embroiled in controversy when he was accused of achieving his effects by retouching (a microscopic examination revealed that he did retouch his prints). [2|4|7|922]

Napoleon Sarony (1821–1896), born in Quebec the year Napoleon Bonaparte died, opened his first New York studio in 1864. No taller than his namesake, Sarony was referred to as "the Napoleon of Photography" because of his flamboyant and volatile approach to making portraits. A natural actor, Sarony enjoyed parading down Broadway in an astrakhan cap and a calf-skin waistcoat (hairy side out), with his pants tucked into highly polished cavalry boots. [2|4|7|924]Additional examples:
 
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Sarony’s studio was equally flamboyant. His Wunderkammer or wonder room, as it was called, took up an entire building and featured a hydraulic elevator, an Egyptian mummy, stuffed birds, Russian sleighs, Chinese gods, armor, statues, musical instruments, bamboo umbrellas, chests, Indian pottery, a maze of pictures, and a crocodile suspended from the ceiling. The forerunner of the modern museum in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the wonder room was a place where the nobility and the wealthy kept their collections of diverse objects for the purpose of celebrating the strange and marvelous. The contents were selected solely according to the owner’s fancy and were presented unsystematically, in a way designed to astonish and amaze. [2|4|7|925]Additional examples:
 
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Sarony was an early photographic specialist, who concentrated on theater personalities, reportedly making 40,000 portraits of members of the profession. Skilled at retouching, he used this concentration to achieve "effect" and to satisfy the vanity of his clients. As a photographer he was the equivalent of a modern-day director, cajoling, parodying, and even intimidating his sitters to elicit dramatic and expressive representations. To overcome the difficulties of 5 to 60-second exposures, Sarony used a mechanical "posing machine" that allowed a sitter to maintain a more flexible and natural position. This device enabled him to capture the emotional energy of the fictional roles of his actor clients, freeing them from conventional portrait poses. Uninterested in the mechanics of photography, Sarony worked with Benjamin Richardson, his cameraman, to whom he gave credit, to make the pictures he desired. Sarony positioned the sitter while Richardson deftly captured his vision. Richardson offered this account of Sarony’s technique: [2|4|7|926]

One of the first photographers to display the copyright notice on his card mounts,⁶ Sarony sued a lithography firm for copyright violation over his portrait of Oscar Wilde. He not only won the suit, but established the legal precedent that photography could be an art.⁷ [2|4|7|929]

Although hand-coloring of images was widely practiced, photographers often balked at retouching, for it was time consuming and expensive, and many considered it fraudulent. Hence, anything that Sarony or Adam-Salomon achieved by retouching was of no value to those who believed that making revisions to the negative was blasphemous, which showed how quickly the negative achieved the status of an inviolable container of truth. [2|4|8|931]Additional examples:
 
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However, the new larger-sized cabinet prints revealed characteristics many sitters did not find flattering. Customers demanded that the camera image be softened and facial imperfections eliminated. Photographers thus began to offer sitters the option of having an idealized portrait made, marking the beginnings of image (fantasy) taking precedence over reality. As photographers became more proficient in their use of light, pose, and retouching, they could now modify human appearance and offer illusionary beings as role models, triggering new standards for looks and fashion. Problems surfaced as people forgot that these images were constructions and began to use them as yardsticks to measure their own appearance and came up lacking. This conflict between reality and how that reality is pictured generates the question: Do photographs show how things are or how they look photographed? [2|4|8|932]

Before the collodion era, almost all photographic images were the size of the original camera exposure. John Draper experimented with enlarging daguerreotypes in 1840, and in 1843, Alexander Wolcott patented an enlarging device that permitted a daguerreotype to be rephotographed onto a larger plate or a piece of calotype paper. Others, including Talbot, conducted enlarging experiments, but the process was impractical and rarely done. In the early 1850s, however, photographers began to make enlargements with cameras that used reflectors and a copying lens to transmit sunlight through a glass plate negative onto a bigger piece of albumen paper. The first practical solar enlarger was patented by David A. Woodward in 1857. Based on the solar microscope in use since 1740 and designed to make enlargements onto a canvas that would later be painted over, the enlarger was a horizontal device that used a mirror to relay sunlight to a condenser lens the same size as the negative. This light passed through the negative to a copy lens that focused the image onto an easel where the albumen paper was placed for exposures of 45 to 60 minutes. By the mid-1860s, solar enlargers could be seen on the roofs and in the windows of major photographic establishments, and, with improvements, they continued in use until the 1890s. The first vertical enlarger had been designed in 1852 by Achille Quinet of Paris. In 1858, J. F. Campbell’s take on this idea used a camera in an opening in his studio roof to make enlargements on a table below. Campbell continued to refine his device until it came to resemble our modern-day enlarger. [2|4|8|933]

Larger images increased the demand for more photographs, which led to more companies producing manufactured photographic goods and services, thus imposing standardization on the practice. Retouching and spotting became everyday procedures, as small defects were now noticeable. As bigger pictures were hung on walls instead of being placed in albums, photographs became more directly related to drawing and painting, causing confusion as to the aesthetic criteria needed to evaluate a photograph. [2|4|8|934]

The concept of enlarging meant that a print did not have to adhere to the original construction of the negative, but could act as raw material for the postcamera operations that defined the final image. This was a radical departure from how pictures were previously put together, and it came to shape much of twentieth century practice. Thomas Skaife’s single-lens miniature camera, the Pistolgraph (1858), took instantaneous "shots" by means of a spring shutter that was operated by rubber bands when its trigger was fired. (Skaife was almost arrested for "shooting" Queen Victoria with his "pistol." The image was lost when Skaife had to open his camera to convince police he was not an assassin.) The tiny plates, 1 1/2 inches in diameter, were "hand-enlarged," that is, the processed negatives were projected to their chosen size, but the image was hand-traced onto a piece of paper rather than transferred by photographic means. [2|4|8|935]