The first commercial use of photography was in the production of portraits. Photography replaced painting almost completely from the 1840s, with fully equipped studios in existence. The photography process was much shorter and simpler compared to painting, in which the subject and even the painter used to suffer.
It became relatively easy and cheap to set up a photographic studio, so by the 1870s there were many thousands of portrait studios in Europe and America. Despite this, remarkably few of the studios have survived to this day in a recognizable form.Since the early years of the 20th century the business functions of a photographic studio have increasingly been called a photographic agency leaving the term “photographic studio” to refer almost exclusively to the workspace.Here below is a set of lovely photos from The Past on Glass at Sutton Archives that shows studio portraits of Edwardian families.
