The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype

Introduction

Introduction In March 1839, Samuel F. B. Morse wrote to Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre with an irresistible proposition: I’ll show you my telegraph if you show me your daguerreotypes. Morse was traveling in Europe to secure patents for and promote his recent invention when Daguerre’s new image-making process was announced in Paris. An accomplished painter as well as an inventor who had experimented unsuccessfully with photochemical imaging in the early 1820s, Morse was especially eager to examine his fellow artist-inventor’s images firsthand and before they were made public.1 He exploited not only his and Daguerre’s common pursuits but also the ancient correlation of word and image to establish an instant intimacy between the men and their machines.2 He wrote about what he saw in a letter to his brother-editor Sidney E. Morse, who published an extract from the letter in the New-York Observer on April 20. The extract begins by proclaiming the daguerreotype ‘‘one of the most beautiful discoveries of the age’’ and concludes by boldly predicting that the medium will achieve ‘‘perfect representations of the human countenance’’ and ‘‘reveal the secrets of ‘microscopic nature.’’’3 Photography began as daguerreotypy, yet daguerreotypy is both like and unlike subsequent forms of photography.4 When we look at a daguerreian image, we recognize it as a photograph for the way that it captures a moment in space and time in fine detail through the exposure of photosensitized materials to light and chemicals rather than through the marks of an artist’s brush or an engraver’s burin. But if we look more closely, the incomparable sharpness of this type of photographic image becomes visible, even more so with a magnifying glass; to achieve such resolution using modern digital imaging technology would require a camera capable of a staggering 140,000 megapixel resolution.5 When viewed firsthand, the polished silver surface of the daguerreian image plate further distinguishes it from all other kinds of photography. Because this mirror-like surface both holds the image and reflects back the viewer in the act of looking at it, a 2 Introduction daguerreotype is viewable only in raking light; its image reverses from positive to negative and seems to disappear altogether until the viewer finds the right angle.6 Finally, unlike the mass reproducible images of negative-topositive and digital photographic processes, each daguerreotype is a unique direct-positive image, laterally reversed from the original orientation of its subject. Multiples could be made only by daguerreotyping an original daguerreotype or by using a camera with more than one lens to record simultaneous, but slightly different, exposures of the same subject. For all of these reasons, photographic reproductions of daguerreotypes, including those in this book, cannot do them justice—a material fact that is easy to overlook in our tendency to focus on the image instead of the medium. As these details only begin to suggest, daguerreotypes are extraordinarily complex images and objects. In my effort to come to terms with this complexity and its cultural implications, The Camera and the Press focuses on daguerreotypy where it was experienced, practiced, and written about most extensively—in the antebellum United States. A good deal of important work has been done on the daguerreotype in America; Robert Taft, Richard Rudisill, Beaumont Newhall, Alan Trachtenberg, John Wood, and Susan S. Williams, among others, have taken on its aesthetic and cultural significance in the antebellum period.7 The Camera and the Press distinguishes itself from these works by building its arguments on another crucial , but neglected material fact: that America’s initial encounter with daguerreotypy was textual rather than visual.8 Before most people ever saw an actual daguerreotype, they encountered this new imaging medium through written descriptions like Morse’s that were published and rapidly reprinted throughout the country. I contend that we have lost sight of this mediation and its significance to how we see photography even today because popular discourse about photography has conditioned us to think about the medium as unmediated since 1839.9 The Camera and the Press focuses on the extensive print record of the daguerreotype’s introduction and incorporation into antebellum American culture so that we are able to see this idea of photography as an unmediated form of representation under construction from the beginning. Looking closely at the scaffolding of what has become almost an instinctive way of seeing photography allows us to understand this way of seeing as a human artifact...