Daguerre

Apprenticed at an early age to an architect, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre gravitated to the Paris theater, and by the age of sixteen already had achieved the rank of assistant stage designer. He specialized in lighting, and became famous for his contributions to stage plays and operas. That in turn led him to strike out on his own as an entertainment entrepreneur and develop his "Diorama," a form of spectacle involving vast paintings (70 by 45 feet in size), variously lit and backlit, that unrolled before the onlookers' eyes to construct narratives and panoramas. These enjoyed great popularity in Paris in the 1820s.

Accustomed, like many artists and artisans of the time, to using the camera obscura as part of his equipment for these projects, Daguerre came logically to the challenge of finding some way to render its evanescent images in permanent form. Toward that end, in 1829 he formed a partnership with Nicephore Niepce, who died in 1833. What they had in common during their collaboration was the assumption that the ideal process for which they sought would result in the creation of a direct positive.

In 1835 Daguerre discovered -- accidentally, by his own account -- a means of generating a latent image on a sensitized and exposed plate. Not until 1837 did he find a way to fix or make permanent that image. Heavily invested financially in this enterprise, and despairing of any possibility of protecting a patent on his easily replicable technique, Daguerre chose -- on his own behalf, and that of his late partner's son -- to sell the process to the French government, which in turn donated it to the world. With the assistance of the astronomer Franois Dominique Arago, the painter Paul Delaroche, and others, this was accomplished in 1839.

The rest, in many senses, is history -- including the fact that Daguerre secretly secured a patent for his invention in England and Wales just days before the announcement of the French government's largesse, with the result that daguerreotypy did not develop in the United Kingdom as it did elsewhere. (For more on this, see the commentary by Lady Elizabeth Eastlake.)

The direct-positive approach as a photographic technology has severe limitations -- especially in the medium's utilitarian applications -- when compared to the positive-negative method pioneered by William Henry Fox Talbot. As a result, the daguerreotype fell into disuse after a few decades, not even enjoying an artisanal revival until the late 1960s. Nonetheless, the direct-postive method has had numerous subsequent incarnations: the ambrotype, the tintype, the various Polaroid formats, and a few others. Whether the digital image represents a direct positive remains unresolved.

Daguerre wrote at some length about his discovery, and we will gradually post as many of these works as we can. Our representation of these texts begins with the bill sponsored by Arago in 1839, in whose drafting Daguerre surely had a hand.

-- A. D. Coleman