Henry Mullins was a photographer who was founded in the first few years of photography being originated. Photography came about in the year 1839, Henry Mullins started working at 230 Regent Street in London in the 1840s. He then moved to Jersey due to tax reasons in 1848 and carried on his career of photography. He set up his own photography studio known as the Royal Saloon, at 7 Royal Square. in the beginning, he was known to have worked with a Mr Millward but a year on from that he worked alone for the next 26 years in the same studio.

There was short period in the 1860s where Mullins worked in London but there is a large amount of photographs, which are held by the  La Société Jersiaise, that suggest there were plenty of people on the island willing to pay a good amount of money to have their photograph taken by Mullins.

Cartes de visite

Henry Mullins has a speciality called ‘Cartes de visite’ and the photographic archive of La Société has a big collection of these, which are produced in albumen, which was a thin paper photograph mounted on a thicker paper card. The size of a carte de visite is 54.0 × 89 mm normally mounted on a card sized 64 × 100 mm. On the online version of the archive there is 9600 images. this was usually done by a number of 16 photographs taken in one sitting.

Some of Henry Mullins’ photographs

Diamond Cameo

A Diamond Cameo is a process in which four separate portraits of the same subject are printed on a carte-de-visite. the four photos are usually taken from different angles of the subject. These are then printed onto each of the oval shapes of only their headshots and not their body.