One of the first things you’ll notice about Danh’s images is that they’re kind of blue. But they’re not hand-colored or toned post-process. Daguerreotypes are naturally sensitive to blue and ultraviolet light, meaning the brightest spots, like the sky or a waterfall, take on a blue tint when overexposed. PHOTO: Danh

The daguerrotype makes for an interesting chapter in the history of photography. One reason why you should catch the last two days of the exhibition of Binh Danh‘s daguerrotypes of Yosemite National Park. Address: The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C; head to the exhibition titled “The Memory of Time”.

Standing in front of photographer Binh Danh’s daguerreotype of Yosemite Falls, on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., I saw myself staring back through the image.

If you look at a daguerreotype in person (unfortunately you can’t tell on a screen), you can see your reflection in the silver plate. At first I tried to move off to the side to get an unobstructed view, until I realized that being confronted with my reflection might be part of the experience. It turns out that this is exactly what Danh had in mind. “Conceptually, I hope one contemplates the land in relationship to one’s body and even identity.”

As a child, Danh would pore over “magical and mysterious” photos of Yosemite. But as an adult, they paralyzed him. “Those photographs kept me away from visiting the park,” he says. “It seemed all views of Yosemite had been taken and there was no more that I could say about it.”

Danh’s family left Vietnam when he was a child, relocating to San Jose, California, which is only a four-hour drive from Yosemite. At that time, though, the park felt like it existed in a different universe. “My parents wouldn’t know how to get there, and if they did want to go, closing our TV repair shop for a day was out of the question. I was left,” he says, “to only visiting Yosemite in photographs.”

That all changed when Danh decided to learn a new photographic process, one of the first ever invented: the daguerreotype. Historically, they were mostly used to capture portraits of loved ones on a handheld scale, but Danh realized he could push the boundaries of that small scale to take in new kinds of views. “I realized that there was a whole genre of photography to explore with this medium: landscape photography.” He finally had the angle he needed to take on Yosemite.

Read more and see some of Danh’s daguerrotypes here.