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

1. The Daguerreotype in Antebellum American Popular Print

Chapter  The Daguerreotype in Antebellum American Popular Print On the front page of the February 23, 1839, Boston Daily Advertiser, a brief article reprinted from Paris’s Journal des Débats appeared under what had become a common headline in an age of concentrated scientific experimentation and innovation: ‘‘Remarkable Invention.’’1 The article begins, At a session of the Academy of Sciences, held the 8th of January, M. Arago gave an account of a curious invention lately made by M. Daguerre; for making drawings. The manner in which the camera obscura produces images of objects, by means of a lens, is well known. The new invention is a method of fixing the image permanently on the paper, or making a permanent drawing, by the agency of light alone; ten or fifteen minutes being amply sufficient for taking any view, though the time varies with the intensity of the light. By this machine M. Daguerre has made accurate drawings of the gallery of the Louvre and of Notre Dame; any object indeed, or any natural appearance may be copied by it—it reproduces the freshness of morning—the brilliancy of noon—the dim twilight and the dullness of a rainy day. The colours are marked by a gradation of shades similar to aqualuita [aquatint—ed.]. By first establishing the invention’s commonality with the old (the camera obscura), the article prepares readers for what is new and different—what is inventive and remarkable—about it: the ‘‘method of fixing the image permanently on the paper, or making a permanent drawing, by the agency of light alone.’’ The article assumes that readers are familiar with the camera obscura, which projects an optically precise image onto a medium that Antebellum Popular Print 13 is incapable of retaining it without the intervention of an artist’s hand; it also implies that an artist must replicate by tracing the otherwise ephemeral image as it is projected onto paper or canvas. In the case of Daguerre’s ‘‘machine,’’ the article emphasizes, ‘‘light alone’’ is the copyist, making ‘‘accurate drawings’’ of ‘‘any object’’ or ‘‘any natural appearance.’’ What is most remarkable about Daguerre’s invention, then, is its unprecedented achievement of a simultaneously ‘‘natural’’ and mechanical—thus, an unmediated, objective, and scientific—means of representation. With Daguerre’s method, man is replaced by a machine that allows nature to record itself without human interference as art becomes a science. What is most remarkable about America’s, and much of the world’s, first encounter with this supposedly unmediated form of representation is just how mediated it was. Before anyone in the United States saw any actual daguerreotypes, they read about them in newspaper and magazine articles, such as the one published in the Boston Daily Advertiser. These articles were translated or reprinted from French and British periodicals by metropolitan editors keeping a keen eye out for the first word of exciting news from abroad to compete with rival papers. Their British sources were translating from the French, and the original French articles described the process by summarizing François Arago’s January 7, 1839, announcement of Daguerre’s invention at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. And significantly , at this first public announcement of the invention of what we now call photography, Arago only described the process and the appearance of the images without exhibiting any examples as Daguerre was in continuing negotiations with the French government for payment in return for the full details of his discovery.2 Though it has become easy for us to overlook from the perspective of the image-saturated present, photography thus came into public view verbally, not visually. Despite sustained scholarly attention to the invention of photography and to its incorporation into American culture, we have yet to register fully either the extent or the effects of its linguistic and textual mediation.3 This chapter closely reads a series of early responses to the daguerreotype— specifically, articles, essays, and stories that appeared in a range of popular antebellum U.S. print publications—to attend to the different phases of daguerreotypy’s incorporation into popular culture. In doing so, it reveals how the idea of photographic objectivity was necessarily a linguistic construction , emerging over time in a diverse array of print publications. By ‘‘photographic objectivity,’’ I mean our still strong cultural tendency to see 14 Chapter 1 the photographic image as capturing its subject ‘‘as it is’’ or...