TECHNOLOGY × ART

The Daguerreotype and Early Photography

1839 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

The daguerreotype, made public in 1839, was the first widely used photographic process: an image formed by light on a silvered copper plate, finer than any drawing.

The daguerreotype, announced in January 1839 to the Academy of Sciences and made public the same year, is the first widely diffused photographic process: a silvered copper plate on which the image forms through the action of light, with a fineness of detail drawing does not attain. The process comprises three operations. Silver salts darken under the effect of light, which inscribes a latent image; this is then developed; it is finally fixed by dissolving the unexposed salts. That last stage conditions all the rest, failing which the image would continue to darken until it disappeared. Talbot's calotype, on paper, follows immediately and introduces reproducibility by negative. Within months, portrait studios are established worldwide.

Why it matters

Photography simultaneously modifies the regimes of evidence, memory and representation: preservation of the features of the dead, documentation of conflicts, instrumentation of scientific observation, and the emancipation of painting from resemblance. All later visual techniques, cinema, television and digital imaging, proceed from it.

Dating & uncertainty

The daguerreotype results from the work of a network of physicists and chemists studying the chemical action of light, Niepce and Daguerre foremost; Talbot's paper negatives follow immediately, and the announcement gives rise to priority controversies still studied. The process is today the object of analyses bearing on the structure of the silver nanoparticles that form the image.

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:0851.3 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day