After the press announcement, in January 1839, of Daguerre's process, would-be photographers rushed to make their own images. But they were quickly chastened. As the English daguerreotypist John Werge recalled, the process was ‘extremely delicate and difficult, slow and tedious to manipulate, and too insensitive to be applied to portraiture’. Although more details were published in scientific and popular journals, it quickly became apparent that while a skilful operator could produce images of astonishing quality, there were severe limitations to Daguerre's process.
At the outset, such limitations did not deter those intrepid travellers prepared to encumber themselves with daguerreotype equipment. Daguerreotype expeditions were a problematic exercise involving the transport of bulky camera, chemicals, and apparatus, sometimes over vast distances. On arrival, photography in the open air often meant battles with the elements or insects while struggling with complicated chemical manipulations. But despite these tribulations, hundreds of foreign views were produced. For the first time, people were able to see the world as it seemed really to be, rather than through the eyes of the artist.
However, most early daguerreotypists were frustrated by the long exposures required, which limited them to static subjects. The great prize was to find a means of reducing exposure times to the point where portrait photography was practicable. Solutions came from several sources, with American experimenters at the forefront. Alexander S. Wolcott opened the world's first photographic portrait studio in New York in March 1840. Wolcott's success was based on an ingeniously designed camera, in which a concave mirror replaced the more usual lens. This unusual optical system limited the plate size, and the images produced were by later standards of indifferent quality, but the American public was enthralled by them. Improvements then came thick and fast. In London during 1840, John Goddard found that bromine vapour dramatically increased the sensitivity of the plates and Antoine Claudet found that mixtures of chlorine and iodine vapours had a similar effect. The ‘fast’ lens developed by Josef Petzval in Austria was also a significant improvement. In France, Hippolyte Fizeau (1819-96) found that the fragile surface of a daguerreotype image could be toughened and toned by gold chloride.
Richard Beard (1802-85), who had bought a licence from Daguerre's agent, opened Europe's first daguerreotype portrait studio in London's Regent Street in March 1841. Other operators rapidly followed Beard's lead. Fortunes were made as cities and towns throughout Europe and America opened their own daguerreotype studios. By 1850, such establishments were operating as far away as India and Hong Kong. City studios were typically lavishly furnished and became fashionable haunts of the upper and wealthy middle classes. In rural areas, commercial practitioners tended to operate on a more modest scale. Some saw daguerreotype portraiture as a lucrative sideline to a more traditional trade and the quality of images produced was often poor. Werge claimed that the first portrait he saw of himself revealed ‘a scowling looking individual with a limp collar, and rather dirty looking face’. There were also itinerant operators who travelled from village to village but frequently produced little more than blackened or blank plates. This failed to dampen enthusiasm, and quality improved as the better operators became established. The American public had a special affection for the daguerreotype and American daguerreotypes shown at the 1851 Great Exhibition were judged to be the finest in the world.
The success of the daguerreotype was brief, however. By 1855, the process was being ousted from popular favour by the new wet- collodion process. Daguerreotype photography was a technological dead end—not least, of course, because its product was a unique image—but its commercial exploitation through the portrait studio introduced the new art of photography to the world.
Daguerreotypy was continued by a trickle of practitioners from the late 19th century into the 20th. But a strong revival took place from the 1970s onwards, embracing both picture making and research into the history and chemistry of the process. With some exceptions in other countries (for example, Patrick Bailly-Maitre-Grand in France, Michael Breton in Belgium, and Sadahiro Koizumi in Japan), activity centred in America. In 1977, Thomas Nelson published an important handbook, A Practical Introduction to the Art of Daguerrotypy in the 20th Century. In 1988, a new, American-based Daguerrian Society was founded. The following year, the 150th anniversary of the 1839 announcement, two American specialists, Grant Romer and Irving Pobboravsky, were commissioned by the Musée Carnavalet, Paris, to daguerreotype Parisian landmarks for a major commemorative exhibition. Researchers from the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House demonstrated the process at workshops at the sesquicentennial celebration held in France in 2002.
— John P. Ward
Bibliography
- Werge, J., The Evolution of Photography (1890).
- Gernsheim, H. and A., The History of Photography (1969).
- Romer, G. B., “‘The Daguerreotype in America and England after 1860’”, History of Photography, 1 (July 1977).
- Buerger, J. E., French Daguerreotypes (1989).
- Verhulst, J., ‘The Contemporary Daguerreotype’, in J. Wood (ed.), America and the Daguerreotype (1991).
- Bajac, Q., Planchon-de Font-Réaulx, D., and Daniel, M., Le Daguerreotype français: un objet photographique (2003)
