Say "Aaaaahhhh"
It's the birthday anniversary of Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, inventor of the early photographic process daguerreotypy. He was born near Paris on this day in 1787.
A daguerreotype is made on a sheet of silver-plated copper. The surface is polished to a mirror like brilliance and made light-sensitive by coating with iodine fumes. The plate is then exposed to an image sharply focused by the camera's well-ground, optically correct lens. Removed from the camera, the plate is treated with mercury vapors in order to develop the latent image. Finally, the image is "fixed" by removing the remaining photosensitive salts in a bath of "hypo" (sodium thiosulfate) and toned with gold chloride to improve contrast and durability. Color, made of powdered pigment, was applied directly to the metal surface with a finely-pointed brush.
Samuel Morse introduced the technology to the United States in the late 1830s. An 1839 New Yorker article marveled, "All nature shall paint herself—fields, rivers, trees, houses, plains, mountains, cities, shall all paint themselves at a bidding, and at a few moment's notice. Towns will no longer have any representatives but themselves. Invention says it. It has found out the one thing new under the sun; that by virtue of the sun's patent, all nature, animate and inanimate, shall be henceforth its own painter, engraver, printer, and publisher. Here is a revolution in art."
Learn more about early photography in our online exhibition Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype.
Source: Merry A. Foresta and John Wood. Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype (Washington, D.C.: The National Museum of American Art and Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).
Pictured: Unidentified Artist, Dentist, about 1855, daguerreotype with applied color (1/4 plate), 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denhausen Endowment.
It's the birthday anniversary of Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, inventor of the early photographic process daguerreotypy. He was born near Paris on this day in 1787.
A daguerreotype is made on a sheet of silver-plated copper. The surface is polished to a mirror like brilliance and made light-sensitive by coating with iodine fumes. The plate is then exposed to an image sharply focused by the camera's well-ground, optically correct lens. Removed from the camera, the plate is treated with mercury vapors in order to develop the latent image. Finally, the image is "fixed" by removing the remaining photosensitive salts in a bath of "hypo" (sodium thiosulfate) and toned with gold chloride to improve contrast and durability. Color, made of powdered pigment, was applied directly to the metal surface with a finely-pointed brush.