{ The Daquerreotype and Early Photographs The Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, was the inventor of the first photographic process which was presented to the.

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The Daquerreotype and Early Photographs

The Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, was the inventor of the first photographic process which was presented to the public in Paris in 1939.

The daguerreotype process was the first practicable method of obtaining permanent images with a camera. The man who gave his name to the process and perfected the method of producing direct positive images on a silver-coated copper plate was Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, a French artist and scenic painter. Daguerre had began experimenting with ways of fixing the images formed by the camera obscura around 1824, but in 1829 he entered into partnership with Joseph Nicephore Niepse a French amateur scientist and inventor who in 1826 had succeeded in securing a picture of the view from his window by using a camera obscura and a pewter plate coated with bitumen. Niepse called his picture making process “heliography” (“sun drawing”), but although he had managed to produce a permanent image using a camera, the exposure time was around 8 hours.

After the death of Niepce in 1833, Daguerre continued to experiment with copper plates coated with silver iodide to produce direct positive pictures. Daguerre discovered that the latent image on an exposed plate could be brought out or "developed" with the fumes from warmed mercury. The use of mercury vapor meant that photographic images could be produced in twenty to thirty minutes rather than hours. In 1837, Daguerre found a way of "fixing" the photographic images with a solution of common salt.(http://www.photohistory-sussex.co.uk)

Elite daguerreotype studios were appointed with colorful velvet tapestry, frescoed ceilings, six-light chandeliers and impressive daguerreotypes.

“With the daguerreotype, the marriage of photograph and mirror is a fantastic one.” — Adam Fuss

Most of the photographic artwork and information in this instructional material is taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Website. Please refer to the website for sizes. All of the photographs were made in the daguerreotype process.

Select four of the photographs and write a personal essay in your own words. Use the rubric as a tool to assess your progress. Write a comparison and contrast of at least four of the photographs that I have provided for your analysis and further research. You may want to try to structure the comparison and contrast essay in a similar fashion as a “Document Based Question” Essay is structured on the Global Regents Exam and consider questions such as the following: •  What do you see in each image?; What is compelling about each one? •  How did the the photographers try to show to the viewer something in respect to each portrait? • Can you describe the intellectual thoughts that you have when you look at the images that you selected? For example, does either the photographer or the sitter expose expressiveness, stoicism or Realism? Please explain your observations.

• How do the images work on a level that is different from when they were first made?

Keokuk or the Watchful Fox by Thomas M. Easterly, 1847; Keokuk was the chief of the Sac and Fox Tribe band of the Mississippi. The movement of Keokuk’s tribe from Iowa to the Nemaha Reservation was part of the government’s efforts to move all tribes that had originally inhabited the Mississippi and lower Missouri valleys to Indian Territory west of the Iowa-Missouri-Arkansas border.

Kno–Shr, Kansas Chief, 1853 by John Fitzgibbon; This daguerreotype of Kno-Shr, a Kansa, is one of the few dated pre–Civil War portraits of a Native American whose name and tribe are known. The chief is shown bare-chested, wearing a traditional grizzly bear claw necklace, the most coveted of all Plains Indian body ornaments. Several details are hand colored with red paint, the color of strength and success and a powerful agent to ward off evil spirits. Made during the height of the country's territorial expansion beyond the Mississippi, the photograph is remarkable as a document of a Native American before assimilation.

This image is an early daguerreotype. It is known as the first example of photojournalism which documents an arrest in 1847 in France.

First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln

Albert Cook Myers Collection, Chester County Historical Society; This 1848 daguerreotype is a rare image of Frederick Douglass as a young man. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Many Northerners also found it hard to believe that such a great orator had been a slave. (Wikipedia)

Frederick Douglass, Daguerreotype; He wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which became a bestseller and influential in supporting abolition, as did the second, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). After the Civil War, Douglass remained an active campaigner against slavery and wrote his last autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

Abraham Lincoln, Daguerreotype, 1846 earliest known photograph of Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln

1846-47, daguerreotype portraits of John Brown, the abolitionist who led the Pottawatomie Massacre, and the raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859

Portrait of the Abolitionist John Brown in 1856

ca. 1852, daguerreotype portrait of an Iroquois man, probably Seneca

Portrait of the American poet Emily Dickinson

Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1850s Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811–1894); Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808–1901)Daguerréotype; 4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in. (10.8 x 8.3 cm)

This quarter-plate daguerreotype of the American author Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) was probably made around the time of the publication of her influential novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). The enormously successful book, which the deeply religious Stowe maintained was the result of a vision from God, was instrumental in focusing antislavery sentiment in the North prior to the Civil War. Charmingly paired with a delicate potted plant in a scene evoking a quiet domestic interior, Stowe appears small and rather demure—a surprisingly mild depiction of a woman known for the power of her literary voice, and for her passionate espousal of abolition. (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/37.14.40)

Daguerreotype of Henry David Thoreau, American author, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book, Walden, and his essay, “On Civil Disobedience”

Hutchinson Family Singers, 1845, Unknown Artist, American School

The original members of the Hutchinson Family Singers were thirteen of the sixteen children of Jesse and Mary Hutchinson of Milford, New Hampshire. The eleven sons and two daughters made their singing debut in the late 1830s and at first sang sentimental, patriotic tunes celebrating the virtues of rural life. In 1842, however, they began to associate closely with the abolitionists, and soon their repertory of songs championed such reformist causes as temperance, women's rights, and above all, the abolition of slavery. Both praised and vilified by the press and public, America's first group of social protest folk singers performed throughout the country for more than fifty years.

Daguerreotype, Rochester Museum and Science Center in Rochester, New York; Native Americans in the Lewis Henry Morgan Collection that had been tentatively identified as "possibly Plains”, 1852