Picture Perfect: Life in the Age of the Photo Op - New Edition

CHAPTER 1: Picture Perfect

CHAPTER 1 Picture Perfect a Just before noon on March 8, 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre , a French painter and inventor, traveled through the streets of Paris to an appointment with a visitor from America. For over seventeen years, Daguerre had been the proprietor of one of the most popular spectacles in Paris, a theater of illusions called the Diorama. No actors performed in Daguerre’s Diorama theater. It consisted of a revolving floor that presented views of three stages. On each stage was an enormous canvas (72 by 48 feet) with scenes painted on both sides. Through the clever play of light, Daguerre could make one scene dissolve into another. Parisians were treated to the sight of an Alpine village before and after an avalanche , or Midnight Mass from inside and outside the cathedral, accompanied by candles and the smell of incense. The realism of these illusions was so compelling that an art student once set up an easel and began to paint one of the scenes. Daguerre was quick to set him straight. “Young man, come as often as you want to, but don’t work here, because you will be making nothing but a copy of a copy. If you want to study seriously , go out of doors.”1 The illusions of the Diorama were no doubt far from Daguerre ’s mind as he walked up the three flights of steps to the apartment where his American colleague was waiting. He had come to see Samuel Morse and his new invention, the telegraph. The two men talked for an hour. As they talked, Daguerre’s Diorama was engulfed in flames. It burned to the ground before he returned, destroying years of work. 42 a C H A P T E R 1 Fortunately, for Daguerre, all was not lost. He had recently completed work on another invention, already secured beyond the reach of the flames. Two years earlier, in 1837, Daguerre had found a way to preserve, chemically, on silver-plated copper, an image of reality. He had invented the photograph. Photography as Document and Artifice Since the sixteenth century, artists had used a device called a camera obscura to enhance the perspective of their paintings. The camera obscura (literally, dark room) was a box with a lens that formed an image on ground glass that the artist could trace. Daguerre had used this device to draw the lifelike paintings for his theater of illusion. Many artists had dreamed of preserving the image rather than tracing it, but until the 1830s, no one had succeeded.2 Daguerre ’s invention of the photograph—known then as the daguerreotype—would transform the way people saw the world and themselves. But in the day of its invention, the photograph seemed to offer a simpler triumph—of reality over illusion, of accuracy over art. Photography seemed to promise a picture more perfect than art could produce. At last it would be possible to document the world objectively, free of the vagaries of the artist’s eye. They called the photograph “the pencil of nature.” Samuel Morse, who became a photographer himself, observed that photographs were not “copies of nature, but portions of nature herself.”3 Oliver Wendell Holmes, father of the noted jurist, called the daguerreotype “the mirror with a memory.”4 The new photographs were so true to life that people examined them as scientists would examine a specimen. Edgar Allan Poe was struck by the photograph’s perfect correspondence to nature. “If we examine a work of ordinary art by means of a powerful microscope, all traces or resemblance to nature will disappear— but the closest scrutiny of the photographic drawing discloses P I C T U R E P E R F E C T a 43 only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.”5 Quite apart from its scientific interest, the daguerreotype won instant popularity in America as a means of portraiture. Traditionally , only the wealthy could afford to commission portraits. With the invention of photography, portraiture became democratic . People from every walk of life could afford a photographic portrait. Every town had a portrait studio. Photographers floated down rivers in houseboat studios and traveled in covered wagons through the countryside. Drawn to photography for its realism, its “absolute truth,” Americans soon confronted a puzzling feature of the new invention . Not all daguerreotypes succeeded in capturing...