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The daguerreotype is one of the earliest types of photograph in which the image is exposed directly onto a mirror-polished surface of silver bearing a coating of silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor. In later developments bromine and chlorine vapors were also utilized, resulting in shorter exposure times. Unlike later photographic processes that supplanted it, the daguerreotype is a direct positive image making process with no “negative” original.

History

While the daguerreotype was not the first photographic process to be invented, earlier processes required hours for successful exposure, making dageurreotype the first commercially viable photographic process and the first to permanently record and fix an image with exposure time compatible with portrait photography.

The daguerreotype is named after one of its inventors, French artist and chemist Louis J.M. Daguerre, who announced its perfection in 1839 after years of research and collaboration with Joseph Nicephore Niepce, applying and extending a discovery by Johann Heinrich Schultz (1724): a silver and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light. The French Academy of Sciences announced the daguerreotype process on January 9 of that year.

Daguerre’s French patent was acquired by the French Government. On August 19, 1839 the French Government announced the invention a gift “Free to the World”. Almost simultaneously in England, Miles Berry, acting on Daguerre’s behalf, had obtained a patent for the daguerreotype process on August 14, 1839.

Proliferation

Daguerreotype photography spread rapidly across the United States but not in England, where Louis Daguerre controlled the practice with a patent. Richard Beard, who bought the English patent from Miles Berry in 1841, closely controlled his investment, selling licenses throughout the country and prosecuting infringers.

In the early 1840s the invention was introduced in a period of months to practitioners in the United States by Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph code. A flourishing market in portraiture sprang up, predominantly the work of itinerant practitioners who travelled from town to town. For the first time in history people could obtain an exact likeness of themselves or their loved ones for a modest cost, making portrait photographs extremely popular with those of modest means. Their wealthy counterparts continued to commission painted portraits by fine artists, considering the new photographic portraits inferior in much the same way their ancestors had viewed printed books as inferior to hand-scribed books centuries earlier. In some ways they were right, in other ways wrong; the vast bulk of 19th century portrait photography effected by itinerant practitioners was of inferior artistic quality, yet the work of many portrait painters was of equally dubious artistic merit, and although photographic images were monochrome they offered a technical verisimilitude to the sitter no portrait painter could achieve.

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