Daguerreotype
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The daguerreotype is an early type of photograph, developed by Louis Daguerre.
While the daguerreotype was not the first photographic process to be invented, earlier processes required hours for successful exposure, which made daguerreotype 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 Daguerre, who announced its perfection in 1839 after years of research and collaboration with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, 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. In Britain, Miles Berry, acting on Daguerre's behalf, obtained a patent for the daguerreotype process on August 14, 1839. Almost simultaneously, on August 19, 1839, the French government announced the invention a gift "Free to the World".
Compared to earlier forms of reproduction
Earlier forms of reproduction, such as woodcuts and lithography could replicate objects, but photography was different due to its speed of recording: "From today, painting is dead!" claimed artist Paul Delaroche on seeing his first Daguerreotype in 1839. Photography took over traditional roles of painting, immediately depicting landscapes, the still life and making portraits, etc; doubtless making portrait artists such as Delaroche redundant.
Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction remarked that "For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens".
