Janet E. Buerger uses this remarkable collection of images to produce a cultural history of the daguerreotype's most learned following—an elite group of mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals who sought to understand and develop the ...

Delving into the images and technique that made the daguerreotype a cutting-edge technology in 1839, the author uses her access to Harvard's collection of images to explore the early phases of this format.

Summary L. J. M. Daguerre realized it was impossible to capitalize by subscription or to patent his daguerreotype technique. In January 1839 François Arago, both scientist and Republican politician, suggested that financial support for Daguerre should be sought from the state in return for his secret. The idea made no immediate headway because of governmental breakdown. Only after a new cabinet was established in May 1839 could any procedure be set in motion to obtain the agreement of parliament. After (...) discussing attitudes towards patents and pensions during the July Monarchy, the article documents the way the Bill for a pension passed through parliament in June and July 1839. An annotated bibliography of the government Bill and Arago's Report to the Chambre des Députés are provided, as well as Arago's Lecture of 19 August 1839 by which a description of Daguerre's process was released to the world. (shrink)

This paper takes as its point of departure Roland Barthes’s proposition in La Chambre claire that the nineteenth century “invented History and Photography,” that the era of photography is one of revolutions, and that the photograph’s “testimony” has diminished our capacity to think in terms of “duration.” Barthes also asserts that the French photographer Nadar is “the greatest photographer in the world,” but takes no account of Nadar’s acute receptivity to the history of the nineteenth century. The paper argues that, (...) though he fully recognized the unique properties of the new medium, Nadar himself was overridingly preoccupied with assessing photography’s role in a period when war and revolution were compromising the onward march of social and economic progress. Throughout his life, he was committed to the progressive ideas that he assimilated while growing up in Paris and Lyon in the 1830s. He wrote of the emergence of a Bohemian culture in the Latin Quarter of Paris, and remained keenly aware of the visual impressions that he had received in his youth from the popular lithographs of the pre-photographic era. He became a supporter of the artistic avant-garde, which led him to purchase important work by the landscape painter Daubigny. In his art criticism, he excoriated the later portraits of Ingres, which might have competed with his own reputation as a photographic portraitist. Yet, in his admiration for Delacroix, he emphasized the lengthy initiation necessary for the appreciation of the master’s paintings, implying a direct contrast with the “instantaneity” of the photographic process. By common consent, the period of Nadar’s great success as a portraitist, which secured his posthumous fame, occupied a short phase in his career as a whole. But his writings show that it was his lively intuition of the wider ramifications of photography that impelled him to move on—experimenting successfully with the first aerial photographs and documenting the catacombs of Paris with the aid of magnesium lighting. Though he could never experience television, he left a narrative in which the feasibility of transmitting images over a distance was presented as being startlingly realistic. In short, Nadar’s published work can be viewed as a sustained meditation on the interaction of historical experience and the media, which not only records but anticipates photography’s impact within the wider framework of visual culture. (shrink)

CATEGORY: Philosophy play; historical fiction; comedy; social criticism. -/- STORYLINE: Katherine, a neurotic American lawyer, meets Christianus for a philosophy session at The Late Victorian coffee shop in London, where they also meet Wendy the waitress and Baldy the player. Will Katherine be able to overcome her deep depression by adopting some of Christianus’s satisfactionist ideas? Or will she stay unsatisfied and unhappy by stubbornly sticking to her own neti-neti nothingness philosophy? And what roles do Baldy, Wendy, and the Okefenokee (...) Man-Monster have in this connexion? -/- TOPICS: In the course of this philosophy play, Katherine and Christianus discuss many things: friendship, a Renoir painting, global warming, elephant conservation, freemasons, Prince of Wales and his tiger-hunting experience in Nepal, Victorian Chartism and a Kennington Common daguerreotype, a Mortality Proof, and, last but not least, Baldy, Wendy, and the gory plot of the Okefenokee Man-Monster. -/- NOTES: This work features elaborate footnotes and comments (including full bibliographical references) by the author, to enhance the reader's experience of the play and its philosophizing characters. (shrink)

When the news of the invention of the daguerreotype left the halls of the French Academy of Sciences in 1839, it fell on the ears of an eager and receptive public, spellbound by the miracle of such an invention. The rapid popularization of the daguerreotype, and subsequently, of less time-consuming photographic processes, forced critics and artists alike to vehemently defend a definition of art that either categorically excluded the new medium or open-mindedly included it within the ranks of (...) a modern or industrialized art. If one maintained, as many did, that the nature and essence of art/literature can be clearly defined and that this definition must be grounded in tradition, coming to terms with what photography was and where it rightfully belonged required either a staunch reaffirmation of one's beliefs about aesthetics or a reassessment of those beliefs. In either case, photography functioned as a disruptive element that did not cause but contributed to an (already existing) artistic movement in which the integrity and solidity of aesthetic definitions and orthodoxies were being questioned and tested. In the minds of those apprehensive and suspicious of the new medium, industrialization, as well as political and social change, had already begun to sound the death knell for art as it had traditionally been conceived. If art/literature had become contaminated by industry, technological advancement and democratic principles, the conservative French nineteenth-century thinker saw it as his duty to save the former from certain destruction. “Saving” art/literature required a fundamental reinforcement of the belief in the closure and soundness of aesthetic definitions whose truth tradition had supposedly guaranteed. Uncovering the presuppositions behind aesthetic definitions that claim to speak in the name of tradition, self-evident truths, and even the nature of man is an endeavor worth pursuing because this manner of thinking leads to a kind of tyranny that has as its goal the suppression of questions, critical inquiry and thus, independent thinking. This study seeks to examine a small part of French aesthetic theory during a period in which change, instability and revolution became almost commonplace. The reactions of conservative artists and critics to post 1840s literary and artistic practices will be scrutinized in order to unveil the deep-seated fears and beliefs that found conservative backlashes to that which is referred to as “new” or “progressive.”. (shrink)

Marcel Proust offered the twentieth century a new psychology of memory and seeing. His novel In Search of Lost Time was written in the modern age of photography and art history. In Looking Back One Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography is an intellectual adventure that brings to light Proust’s visual imagination, his visual metaphors, and his photographic resources and imaginings. The book features over 90 illustrations. Mary Bergstein highlights various kinds of photography: daguerreotypes, stereoscopic cards, cartes-de-visite, postcards, book (...) illustrations, and other photographic mediums. Portraiture, medical photography, spirit photography, architectural photography, Orientalism, ethnographic photography, and fin-de-siècle studies of Botticelli, Leonardo, and Vermeer, are considered in terms of Proust’s life and work. The net is cast wide, and each image under discussion has been researched with subtle attention to art, literature, and cultural history. This scholarly study in literature and visual culture will be a delight, too, for general readers who love photography or Proust. Mary Bergstein is professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design. She won the 2012 “Courage to Dream” book prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association for, Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (Cornell 2010). She has published numerous books and articles on art and visual culture from Italian Renaissance sculpture to contemporary photography. (shrink)

Photographers John Shimon and Julie Lindemann use antique cameras, modern lens technology, artificial light, and contemporary pop culture to create portraits of the people in their native state amidst backyards, living rooms, parking lots, and the landscape of Wisconsin. These recent photographs are juxtaposed with portraits from the Milwaukee Art Museum’s permanent collections, including daguerreotype portraits, ambrotypes, and tintypes of anonymous people taken by nineteenth-century photographers, as well with photographs by such well-known artists as Alfred Stieglitz, Sally Mann, Larry (...) Clark, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Eugene von Beuenchenhein, and Francis Ford. The pairings of new and old illustrate the legacy of portraiture and the significance of “posing” before the lens, and each image is enriched by its proximity to another, unmasking sitter, photographer, and viewer. Unmasked & Anonymous: Shimon & Lindemann Consider Portraiture includes more than sixty color and black-and-white photographs plus essays by Shimon, Lindemann, and Milwaukee Art Museum curator Lisa Hostetler. (shrink)

"American photographers have been fascinated by the lives of California farmworkers since the time of the daguerreotype. From the earliest Gold Rush-era images and the documentary photographs taken during the Great Depression to digital images today, photographers and farmworkers in California have had a complicated and continuously changing bond. In Everyone Had Cameras, Richard Steven Street provides a comprehensive history of the significant presence of California farmworkers in the visual culture of America."--Back cover.

Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre was a true nineteenth-century visionary—a painter, printmaker, set designer, entrepreneur, inventor, and pioneer of photography. Though he was widely celebrated beyond his own lifetime for his invention of the daguerreotype, it was his origins as a theatrical designer and purveyor of visual entertainment that paved the way for Daguerre's emergence as one of the world's most iconic imagemakers. In Speculating Daguerre, Stephen C. Pinson reinterprets the story of the man and his time, painting a vivid (...) picture of Daguerre as an innovative artist and savvy impresario whose eventual fame as a photographer eclipsed everything that had come before. Drawing upon previously unpublished correspondence and unplumbed archival sources, Pinson mixes biography with an incisive study of Daguerre's wide-ranging involvement in visual culture. From his work as a commercial lithographer to his coinvention of the Paris Diorama—a theater in the round in which Daguerre employed natural light and special effects to simulate time and movement in large-scale paintings—here we are given access to Daguerre the artist, whose tireless experimentation, entrepreneurial spirit, and exceptional talent for popular spectacle helped to usher in a new visual age. Filled with more than one hundred illustrations and including the first complete catalogue of Daguerre's paintings, works on paper, and daguerreotypes to appear in print, the publication of Speculating Daguerre will be a much-heralded event for anyone with even a passing interest in one of the most fascinating characters in the history of photography. (shrink)

Photography began almost 150 years ago with the nearly simultaneous invention of two types of photographic processes, the daguerreotype and the Talbotype or calotype. On January 7, 1839, Louis Daguerre announced his discovery of a way to reproduce images on coated copper plate. Shortly thereafter, on January 31, William Talbot explained how shadows of objects could be chemically recorded on salted paper sensitized with silver nitrate. With the advent of photography, the people, architecture, and natural beauty of Chester County, (...) Pennsylvania, made worthy subject matter for many professional and amateur photographers. Photographers in Chester County, many of whom were also skilled artisans and craftsmen, were fortunate in that they lived near Philadelphia, a center of photographic activity. The first photographers in the county were itinerant tradesmen who traveled from place to place, taking photographs, portraits mainly, for a fee. Later, as photography developed and became more widely known, many photographers opened their own studios. Reflected Light: A Century of Photography in Chester County offers an overview of the development of the photographic medium and traces the progress of photography by examining the work of ten Chester County photographers. In the text by Pamela Powell and in striking photographs of the county and its people, the story of photography in its earliest years is deftly told. (shrink)