Backdrops

Backdrops are painted, paper or fabric surfaces hung behind a photographic subject to replace or conceal the actual surroundings of the camera. The word comes from theater slang for the painted cloth at the rear of a stage. Painted scenery appeared behind sitters in the daguerreotype era, but backdrops flourished with the carte de visite in the 1860s, as studio portraiture became an industry. Until about the 1920s, studios kept stocks of landscapes, gardens and interiors with columns, curtains and balustrades, often in trompe-l'oeil, and suppliers such as L. W. Seavey of New York sold them internationally. Their popularity waned as handheld cameras let people be photographed in real places.

Nineteenth-century backdrops were usually painted in tempera or chalk on raw cotton duck, hung from wires or rollers, and paired with real furniture and props to complete the illusion. Twentieth-century studios turned increasingly to neutral grounds such as seamless paper and plain or mottled canvas and muslin, which isolate the figure and remove any horizon line. Irving Penn worked for decades before a found Paris theater curtain softly painted with gray clouds, and later traveled with a portable tent studio to recreate the same neutral setting. For In the American West (1979–1984), Richard Avedon hung a large sheet of white paper on walls and trailers and photographed sitters frontally with an 8 x 10 view camera in open shade. Seydou Keïta's Bamako portraits from 1948 onward instead used patterned textiles, whose motifs merge with the sitters' clothing across the picture surface.

Discussion of backdrops centers on what they remove or add. The white ground has been read as turning sitters into symbolic figures detached from place, and criticized for leaving dispossessed subjects without context. Backdrops are commonly combined with Props and Studio Lighting, differ from Set Construction in offering a single plane rather than a built space, and contrast with Environmental Framing, which keeps sitters within their own surroundings.