Mirrors with Memory: The Magic of Daguerreotypes

 How do I know that? I googled it of class. The electronic revolution has modified our lives in profound methods, and many thanks to a single of these improvements, the smartphone digital camera, we now just take images for granted. It is tricky to impress any individual with a photographic picture these days except it is one thing they’ve never ever found in advance of, a rarer event as each individual working day passes.

Now imagine living in the 1840s, when each photograph was new. Think about seeing, for the first time, an impression of a familiar particular person or object, not rendered by the hand of a human becoming, but via a lens, projected, recorded, and preset on a piece of gentle delicate material, the result of a process that objectively renders a topic, blemishes and all (minus the colour) in two proportions.

Welcome to the world of the daguerreotype.

The genuine magic of the daguerreotype lies in the high-quality of the graphic, unsurpassed in the heritage of images in terms of clarity, tonal variety, and resolution. As the impression is composed of droplets of mercury amalgam, there is no grain, indicating the closer you look, even as a result of magnification, the far more element you will see. The only restrict is the quality of the lens made use of in the development of the impression.

In 1996, a daguerreotype portrait of the abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass entered the assortment of the Photography Section, a single of our significant acquisitions to date.

Douglass was reportedly the most photographed American in the19th century. Acknowledged for meticulously cultivating his public impression, Douglass is likely to have experienced the closing say in this portrait executed between 1847 and 1852 by Samuel Miller, ensuing in an picture of extraordinary ability and solemnity. Commenting about this portrait, fellow abolitionist and women’s legal rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton explained that Douglass appeared “majestic in his wrath.”  

Looking at Daguerreotypes

The most effective way to look at a daguerreotype is the way they had been intended to be seen: by keeping it in your fingers. Commonly a daguerreotype is enclosed inside of a delicate handmade scenario, often a minimal even worse for the have on immediately after in excess of a century and 50 percent of handling. On the inside, opposite the attractive silk cushion whose main reason is to shield the plate, the 1st detail you recognize is your own reflection surrounded by a copper mat.

That is simply because the image is sitting down on top of a copper plate polished to a mirror complete. 

To see the graphic and not your self, the trick is to not watch the daguerreotype straight on, but idea it somewhat so it displays a strong qualifications. If the background is light-weight colored this sort of as a ceiling, the graphic on the plate will look detrimental. 

The whole glory of the daguerreotype is unveiled when seen versus a darkish history. It is at this instant when the issue returns your gaze.

I really do not consider the term magic is an overstatement in this article. Viewing a daguerreotype in this manner is not a passive exercise. The added operate it normally takes is rewarded in spades by the revelation of the graphic in all its glory—whenever it decides to present by itself to you.  

Displaying Daguerreotypes

With those limitations in intellect, it is a challenge to successfully screen daguerreotypes in the gallery. To show the Douglass portrait as we did in two exhibitions—In Their own Correct: Visuals of African Individuals (1997) and Majestic in His Wrath: Frederick Douglass Daguerreotype by S. M. Miller (2003)—we created a stand-alone scenario lined with dark velvet. Fiber optic tubes ended up optimally positioned inside of the circumstance to guarantee that the image, not the reflection of the viewer, would be noticeable from any angle.

However, we can’t frequently invite readers to see these objects in our galleries this way, or to maintain them in their hands. When COVID constraints are lifted, however, we will as soon as yet again supply appointments to the Division of Images and Media Research Room, in which daguerreotypes and other photographic works can be seen up close, with out the hindrance of a body or screen circumstance. In 2019, the Photography Department obtained the W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg Collection, a sizable assortment of early 19th-century American pictures, as a result of the generosity of the The Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Charitable Have faith in the bulk of them ended up little cased objects, and the bulk of these, daguerreotypes. More important is the high-quality of the objects in this selection, and the diversity of their topics. This reward is a great contribution to the selection, escalating our holdings of illustrations of the 1st photographic system to be manufactured public by a variable of 10.

Safeguarding Daguerreotypes

Portion of our task in the Photography Conservation is to give these performs a superior house as effectively as enable determine how to best share them with the public. We are in the process of developing boxes for each daguerreotype in the Lundberg collection. Although daguerreotypes occur in normal dimensions, there is a slight variation in circumstance sizes. To ensure a comfortable fit, every single box is custom made built for every single object. What would be an usually tiresome method is enormously aided by a further the latest acquisition, our Gunnar AiOX computerized mat slicing device, which is also utilized in the creation of the packing containers to comprise the bins, which in turn will be housed in our cold vault.

We hope to see you in the Research Room prior to prolonged, where you can see our conservation handiwork in man or woman. Our objective is to assure that these “mirrors with memories” are around for quite a few upcoming generations to marvel at and love.      

—James Iska, assistant conservator for preparation and framing, Pictures Conservation

Take a look at the Lundberg assortment and the large selection of daguerreotypes our selection. And come across up-to-day data about browsing our Research Area.

Subject areas

• Conservation
• Selection
• Views