THE DAGUERREOTYPE

The daguerreotype got its name after its inventor Louis-Jacques-Mande’ Deguerre, who was a French man, however this final process was a result from a previous collaboration in business with French man Nicephore Niepce. Unfortunately Niepce died from a stroke and it was there that Mande’ continued to work until he came out with his Daguerreotype process.

Daguerreotype of Louis Daguerre in 1844 by Jean-Baptiste Sabatier-Blot

His representative officially announced and made the process public in 1839 during the French Academy of Sciences meeting in Paris. It immediately went viral throughout the world especially in the United States, due to its possibility of capturing a faithful image of the object photographed. The general public could have there own portrait taken and it was more accessible and affordable to almost practically every citizen, unlike before where in order to have a faithful portrait reproduction, one must have sought the service of a painter of which charged much higher prices and required a relative sustainable amount of time to produce the painting. It was estimated that just in New York existed 70 Daguerreotype studios by 1850.

This daguerreotype is the earliest known photograph of Abraham Lincoln, taken at age 37 when he was a frontier lawyer in Springfield and Congressman-elect from Illinois

The process to produce a Daguerreotype was quite simple yet a great amount of care was needed; it consisted in the creation of a detailed image onto a copper plated sheet, which was also coated with a thin coat of silver. First most the sheet needed cleaning and polishing until a mirror effect was achieved, than the plate had to be sensitized with iodine and become yellow in appearance. From there the plate would be placed in a light proof pocket and placed into the camera itself, the exposure was made and the next step was to develop the plate with hot mercury vapor till the image becomes visible. A solution of sodium thiosulfate or salt was placed over the plate to fix the image, than it was toned using cold chloride. These final images where unique as they couldn’t be reprinted, however they could have been reproduced by reapplying the same photographic technique to an already produced daguerreotype.

The Library of Congress, 2002. Daguerreotype Photographs: The Daguerreotype - American Memory. [online] Available at: <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/daghtml/dagdag.html > [Accessed 16 October 2013].