The Daguerreotype: Capturing Forever (part 2 of 3)

A Daguerreotype image is created when a photosensitive layer of silver is applied in a mirror like coating to one side of a copper plate. After taking a picture the plate is developed by exposure to mercury vapor and then permanently fixed by placing it into a bath of hyposulphite of soda. A piece of glass is placed over the image and sealed at the edge to protect the delicate image against abrasion and oxidation. The sealed Daguerreotype was then placed in case (in America) or hung on the wall (in Britain).

Early Daguerreotypes tended to be dark with exposure times that required the sitter to remain still for several minutes. Rapid advances in chemistry and the process in the early 1840s cut exposure times to 10-15 seconds and improved image quality dramatically. As early as 1842 hand coloring of the Daguerreotype was offered, at an additional cost. By the end of the decade the hand-painted portrait miniature, which had been the most “affordable” method of capturing the human likeness was a thing of the past.

Vigilant Fire Company, Baltimore

For the first time in history ordinary people could have a faithful picture of themselves (for between 25 cents to $ 2.50 depending on the size of the image). By 1853 an estimated three million Daguerreotypes were being developed in America per year with perhaps thirty million produced before its replacement by more convenient and less costly photograph processes in the late 1850s.





Daguerreotype of a couple
holding a Daguerreotype

The Daguerreotype: Capturing Forever (part 1 of 3)

-

“Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything that has 'cast up' in my time or is like to - this art by which even the 'poor' can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones.”

— Jane Welsh Carlyle
October 21, 1859
The Collected Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1883)

I hold a worn dark-colored hinged box that is smaller than the palm of my hand. My finger pushes open the delicate brass hook and I carefully open it. An embossed square of red-velvet fills the right hand side. On the left is a small brass frame with an oval of glass. At first I see only a faint outline appearing through the glass but as I move the frame up and down, left and right an image appears and disappears. I find the perfect angle and suddenly a young woman looks at me. She is wearing a light colored dress, the details of which I cannot make out. Over her shoulders is a shawl with alternating thick black and white stripes. But, most striking, is her wide hat that which stretches from one side of the frame to the other. The undersides of the hat are dark and frame her steady, unconcerned face. I am looking across more than a hundred and fifty years of time to the birth of a new technology. I am holding a Daguerreotype.

On August 19, 1839 the French government gave “free to the world” (except to Britain) the secret of the Daguerreotype named for French inventor Louis Daguerre, who in collaboration with Joseph Niépce perfected the technique. It was the earliest photographic process commercial available throughout the world.

Monument in honor of Louis Daguerre
Presented by the Photographer’s Association of America August 15, 1890
On the grounds of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC