Page - 85 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

The Absent Empress 85 it allowed collectors to create imaginative relationships through the arrangement of cartes within their albums.13 Holding these calling-card sized images in the palms of their hands or assembling them into albums, the infinite permutations of individu- als allowed the viewer to make new connections between the different personalities. Margaret Olin calls this imaginative potential of portrait photography a ‘performa- tive index’: “it performs a relation that may not depend on resemblance. Its ability to behave in this relational sense gives a photograph its power to stand in for a per- son.”14 In Olin’s performative index, viewers perceive similarities between disparate photographs, thereby creating links between individuals who are wholly unrelated in real life. Such a theoretical approach is especially appropriate for carte de visite albums, where cartes of rulers occupy the same space as those of family members. Placing a carte of the imperial family beside a carte of one’s own family, a viewer can imagine physical and social resemblances between the two groups of people through compara- tive analyses of composition, gesture, and identity. For example, the 1862 carte de visite of the Schnitzler family (Fig. 5) offers striking similarities with the Habsburg photomontage (Fig. 4). Both portraits situate the mother in a high-backed chair with spiral posts. Franz Joseph rests his hand on Elisabeth’s shoulder in the same pose as Johann Schnitzler does on his wife’s. The viewer can envision the empress occupying the same seat as his wife, or how the photographer directed the emperor to place his hand in just the same manner as in his or her own studio experience. The viewer may even strain to determine the family resemblance between parents and offspring, just as one would with a portrait of one’s own family. The comparison demonstrates the indexical aspect of Olin’s ‘performative index’, as photographs become substitutes for individuals, though not necessarily the individuals represented within the portrait. In this ‘performance’, viewers imagine themselves occupying the same space as the imperial couple. Portrait photography demanded this type of close looking. As described by Alfred Lichtwark, in “our age there is no work of art that is looked at so closely as a pho- tograph of oneself, one’s closest relatives and friends, one’s sweetheart.”15 Although the monarch has no such relationship with the average viewer of a carte de visite album, the scrutiny performed upon the image inserts the imperial family into the same sphere. Under such analysis it is not difficult to understand why the medium appealed to royal portrait makers. The ability to enter into the imaginative lives of their subjects through their physical presence in carte de visite albums granted rul- ers a visual manifestation never afforded by a painted portrait. Mass-produced and distributed across the continent, cartes featuring group portraits of Britain’s Victoria and Albert or France’s Napoleon III and Eugénie projected an image of bourgeois