Students in need of tuition money sometimes prove the saying that necessity is the mother of invention, as this New Yorker historical note indicates:
In 1843, a Dartmouth College freshman named Augustus Washington needed to earn some money for tuition. As a man of mixed-race—a black father, a South Asian mother—many professions were closed to him. But anyone could learn the new art of daguerreotype photography, which had been perfected and publicized a few years earlier by the French artist Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. After mastering the bulky camera, Washington opened a studio in Hartford, Connecticut, where he made a good living photographing middle-class families.
In 1853, Washington began to document a more public piece of history: he emigrated to the newly established Republic of Liberia, where he photographed former American slaves trying to build a free republic in West Africa. Today, Washington’s portraits of Liberian colonists are among the few surviving images of a strange political experiment. Daguerreotypists like Washington were history’s first reliable photographic witnesses: they documented the Gold Rush, early surgical procedures, and the fierce face of the hundred-and-one-year-old Baltus Stone, one of the last surviving Revolutionary War veterans. They captured the sunken-eyed stare of a newly elected congressman named Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, daguerreotypes and other early photography techniques played a prominent role in the “cult of memory” created by the hundreds of thousands of families torn apart by the fighting.
Daguerreotypes are still cherished for their eerie clarity—each plate in an 1848 series of photographs of the Cincinnati waterfront, for example, is equivalent to a hundred-forty-thousand-megapixel photo. They are so detailed that a viewer can distinguish the time on a clock tower, German names on storefronts, and underwear hanging from apartment clotheslines.
Made with a light-sensitive plate held within a shoe-box-sized wooden camera, daguerreotypes required such long exposure times—the earliest daguerreotypes sometimes required subjects to sit still for as long as thirty minutes, though exposure times fell over the life of the technology—that subjects were often held in place with iron collars fitted to the backs of their chairs. The discomfort was apparently worth the novel promise of immortality. And daguerreotypes did initially seem to promise a more robust form of immortality than its successor, photography: because the images were produced on metal plates rather than more fragile material like paper, it was thought that they would be more resistant to degradation.
Yet of the millions of daguerreotypes created during the technology’s heyday, only a small fraction survives. Many were simply discarded—miracles that had become mundane. Others were destroyed by well-meaning, but disastrous, cleaning techniques: in 1934, when a London photographer attempted to restore a nearly century-old portrait of Dorothy Draper, the sister of the scientist and physician John Draper, he accidentally erased the image. In an abject letter to the portrait’s owner, he expressed his regrets: “It is bewildering and has many times made me feel quite dizzy.”…
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Organikos 