What’s So Special about Cabinet Cards? by John Rohrbach

Cabinet cards were ubiquitous over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but they are ignored, even forgotten today. In this heavily illustrated lecture, John Rohrbach will share a few tales about how he came to recognize why cabinet cards matter, including what makes them so different from cartes de visite, and how they helped pave the way for the snapshot. Rohrbach is Senior Curator of Photographs at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, where he has assembled dozens of exhibitions on subjects ranging from the history of color photography in America to projects by contemporary photographers Mitch Epstein, Terry Evans, and Anthony Hernandez. His books include Eliot Porter: The Color of Wildness (Aperture, 2001), Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke (Center for American Places, 2007), Reframing the New Topographics (Center for American Places, 2011), Color: American Photography Transformed (University of Texas Press, 2013), and Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography (University of California Press, 2020). Presented on July 10, 2021.