Glossy Dark Card Fronts
Chocolate Brown, Dark Green and Black
The cards we describe in this article have dark card faces, typically a dark chocolate brown, or very dark green, or even black. There were cards with black fronts both before and after the period we describe, but they tended to be mat-surfaced, like regular writing paper. The cards we are talking about here are glossy-smooth, with an almost waxy surface.
Most of these are cabinet cards, but cart-de-visites and other sized cards occasionally are found with this feature as well. When there is a photographer’s imprint on front, it is almost always printed in gilt. The lack of color contrast may make these imprints hard to read, particularly in copies or when the original gilt has flaked or tarnished, but on a clean mint-new appearing card, the appearance is rich. The dark card fronts also set off the yellowish tinged albumen images nicely.
One type of card we have not included in this study is the black memorial card, even though it was often cabinet-card sized and produced by photographers. Those memorials cards only rarely include a photographic image, most of them are just text. The special usage, and association of black with death and mourning, led to the continued use of glossy-black for memorial cards long after they ceased to be used for photographs. None of the memorial cards we have seen pre-date the earliest use of glossy-black cards for photographs, and only rarely are they seen within the period that glossy-dark cards were popular. In fact, it may have been in part the association with memorial cards that led to the disuse of dark glossy-faced cards for photographs.