Henry Mullins was a photographer who is best known for producing over 9000 portraits of Jersey islanders from 1853 to 1873 at a time when the population was around 55,000. Henry Mullins started working in London in the 1840s and moved to Jersey in July 1848, where he set up a studio and would photograph Jersey political elite, mercantile families, military officers and professional classes. In the record of Mullin’s work, he placed his subjects in a social hierarchy and it is highly politicised.

The portraits taken by Henry Mullins were printed on a carte de visite as a small albumen print, which was a thin paper photograph mounted onto a thicker paper card, and he mounted these prints into an album.

The card photographs became immensely popular because of the small size and affordable reproducibility, and cartes de visite were commonly traded among friends and visitors in the 1860s.