America & the Daguerreotype

edited by John Wood
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press
ISBN 0-87745-675-5
Reviewed by Wilfred Niels Arnold

Louis-Jacques-Mandré Daguerre was born near Paris in 1789 and enjoyed rewarding activities as painter, physicist, showman, and public servant during his 62 years. But it was the invention of the first practical method for photography, the daguerreotype, that was to make his a household name. The new process was announced on his behalf by the distinguished astronomer-physicist D.-F.-J. Argo, at the Academy of Sciences, the second week of January 1839. Shortly thereafter, in a salutary gesture of goodwill, the technique was published "free to the world" by the French Government. In the meantime Daguerre and an heir to Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce (who had collaborated on the initial research) were awarded lifetime annuities of Fr. 6,000 and Fr. 4,000 respectively. By the end of that year pictures of monuments, housed in their characteristic protective cases, were being brought home as treasures by international travelers. It was the time of Edgar Allan Poe, who reported in Alexander's Weekly of January 15, 1840, that the daguerreotype was "perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science." The best known image of the inventor himself, with pensive head resting on hand (a favorite pose for the requisite steadiness of long photographic exposure), was taken by J.E. Mayall in 1948: the original is part of the Gernsheim Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

The process started with a silver-plated sheet of copper that was polished to a mirror finish. That side was then treated with iodine vapor (to form light-sensitive silver iodide) to a golden end-point. The prepared plate was exposed in a box with a focusable lens and elemental silver formed on the surface in proportion to the incident light. The plate was then subjected to heated mercury fumes to trap the nascent silver as a permanent amalgam. Washing in sodium thiosulfate removed unaffected silver iodide and fixed the resultant direct-positive image. The earliest daguerreotypes tended towards bluish or slate-grey tones; a brown-toning process called "gilding" came into widespread use after 1840. A daguerreotype image has remarkable longevity but the surface is so fragile with regard to abrasion that it requires protection behind a glass sheet and a mat.

Cumulative physical and chemical innovations lowered typical exposure times from the original 20-30 minutes to 20-40 seconds and by the late 1840's daguerrian portrait artists had set up shops in every American city. The calotype process, with its paper-based negative and option of multiple positive copies, gradually improved in quality and became more competitive; but within twenty years both processes were essentially replaced by the collodion glass negative and the albumin print. As it turned out, the United States would lead the world in the production of daguerreotypes.

Editor John Wood and his seven independent essayists suggest that the daguerreotype provides a visual and social picture of America between 1840 and 1860. They say that their selected images for America & the Daguerreotype were driven by history, documentation, and social commentary rather than art. Many of the works are by anonymous artists, as if this generates a more serious and unbiased impact. On the other hand it was the only photographic technique of the time and there were obvious limitations with regard to holding the pose, setting up the backgrounds, lighting, arranging family groups, and so forth. As a matter of fact, contemporary painters and print makers did not labor under these restraints and in my estimation some of them generated more realistic images of the era. I'm not convinced that the authors have advanced their working hypothesis that the daguerreotype is a true window on attitudes and behaviors of Americans at this particular period.

America & the Daguerreotype was first printed in 1991 and the present paperback edition probably hopes to reach a more extended audience. The format of the book is 10.5" x 9," on good quality paper, with excellent reproductions. There are eight essays covering subjects as disparate as the depiction of death and dying, through the invasion of America by the calotype (which reads well but seems to be in the wrong book), to the contemporary daguerreotype. All are sprinkled with reproductions that are labeled as figures, never listed, and not always referenced in the text. The lead article on The American Portrait has twenty figures although the reader is left to his own devices to find the connections. The selection of 100 plates, that are variously referenced in the narratives, are followed by 32 pages of notes and then brief biographies on the contributors. A selected bibliography contains just ten items. There is no index . The uninitiated reader will puzzle about sixth or ninth plates until he reaches page 239 and discovers the equivalent dimensions. [The system is based on relative surface area so that a quarter plate, for example, has half the length and half the breadth of a full plate, which is defined as 8.5 x 6.5 in. Some stock sizes only approximate this relationship; a ninth plate happens to be 2.5 x 2 in. which is actually closer to an eleventh of the area of a full plate.] This is but one example of the extensive entry level knowledge that the editor expects of his audience. None of the information in the first three paragraphs of this review can be gleaned from the pages of America & the Daguerreotype and the lack of two or three beginning pages of background material surely detracts from the utility of the book outside the purview of specialists.