Elizabeth Anne McCauley’s *A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph* takes as its subject both a nineteenth-century photographer and the portrait format with which his name is closely associated. Its scope is unusually precise: Disdéri is considered through the carte de visite, while the format is examined through the work and career of a single practitioner. The result is a focused contribution to the histories of photography, portraiture, and photographers.

That dual emphasis gives the book its intellectual structure. Rather than treating biography and photographic form as separate concerns, McCauley’s study places them in direct relation. The standardized portrait photograph becomes more than a category of object; it provides a framework for understanding an individual photographic practice. Conversely, attention to Disdéri gives specificity to a subject that might otherwise be discussed only as a broad development in photographic history.

Published by Yale University Press in 1985, the 262-page volume appeared in the Yale Publications in the History of Art series. This context matters: the book is conceived not simply as a presentation of photographs, but as a sustained historical study. Its subject classifications—photographers, biography, carte de visite photographs, portrait photography, and photographic history—indicate the range brought together within its tightly defined theme.

For collectors of books on nineteenth-century photography, the volume deserves attention for the clarity of that focus. It connects the study of a photographer with the study of a particular photographic type, making it useful alongside broader histories of portraiture as well as monographs devoted to individual figures. Its value within a collection lies in this concentrated perspective: a historically bounded inquiry into how one practitioner and one format can illuminate each other.