From: Martin Reis (mreis@tafelmusik.org)
Date: 09/26/03-12:13:46 PM Z
PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW | 'THE DAWN OF PHOTOGRAPHY'
The Eerie Exactness of the Daguerrotype
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
The daguerreotype was announced to the French public in January 1839. By
December, the rage for it inspired Théodore Maurisset, an illustrator, to
lampoon Parisians in La Caricature with a cartoon called
"Daguerreotypomania": scores of people lining up for their photographic
portraits while engravers, driven out of work by the new technology, hang
themselves from gallows.
To recapture the thrill and astonishment people must have felt at the
invention by the Parisian showman and diorama painter Louis-Jacques-Mandé
Daguerre, you might take a magnifying glass with you to the Metropolitan
Museum's "Dawn of Photography," which has just opened. In the first room is
a view across the Seine by Marie-Charles-Isidore Choiselat, one of the
forgotten masters of this erstwhile art that changed the world. The
daguerreotype is about 6 by 7 inches, a compact panorama.
It shows the Pavillon de Flore and the Tuileries on a September afternoon in
1849. You see the piers of the Pont Royal streaked by shadows under
gathering clouds. A halo surrounds the buildings where the photographer
blocked out part of the picture to prevent the sky from being overexposed.
So we get both sharp detail in the architecture and passing weather, the
halo making the scene look not just dramatic but slightly unreal. The wind
must have been brisk that day because the leaves on the trees in the garden
are a little blurry, a result of the longer exposure time Choiselat allowed
in that part of the picture. But if you take your magnifying glass and look
very closely at the bridge, you can just make out the nearly invisible speck
of a policeman standing at attention.
The daguerreotype is so minutely detailed that when the magnification is
strong enough, you can even count the buttons on the starched front of the
policeman's uniform (as the curator, Malcolm Daniel, confirmed through a
microscope).
The magic of this image, along with its incredible detail, also has to do
with the shimmer of the photographic plate, which, as with all
daguerreotypes, is irreproducible on a printed page. Silvered sheets of
copper, sensitized with iodine and developed in heated fumes of mercury,
daguerreotypes are alchemical objects of ethereal physicality. They shift as
you move past them, glinting in the light, giving fleeting hints of
intangible color, which make the people and objects they capture seem almost
three-dimensional and at the same time vaporous. The effect is akin to what
you may have experienced the first time you saw a holograph: an illusion of
ghostly space.
The show, half the size it was in Paris this summer, is still a little too
large and repetitive, daguerreotypes being small and intricate and hard to
digest by the dozens, but it is lucid and handsome. It tracks the brief
evolution of daguerreotypy in France, where the medium lasted barely two
decades.
In America, the daguerreotype, like its poorer cousin the tintype, appealed
to this nation's inherently empirical and mechanical sensibilities, and
daguerreotypes persisted as an unpretentious tool and folk technique for
making photographs into the 1860's.
But in France, the newer and more practical medium of paper photographs,
which could be printed in multiples, unlike daguerreotypes, caused the
daguerreotype pretty much to go the way of the Hula-Hoop by 1855.
Daguerreotypes were one-of-a-kind objects. Their equipment and materials,
including silver, copper and mercury, were also expensive. Daguerre, who got
an annuity of 6,000 francs by selling his invention to the French
government, in a prospectus in 1838 blithely declared that "everyone can use
the daguerreotype to make views of his chateau or country house," indicating
the clientele he had in mind. Camera plus equipment cost 400 francs in an
era when workingmen made 4 francs a day.
But even if you weren't rich you could hire a daguerreotypist to take your
portrait. Portrait studios opened across France. Millions of portraits were
made, few any good. Sitters had to hold a pose with their heads clamped in
vises to prevent them from moving during the long exposure time, and
caricaturists like Daumier had a ball ridiculing the uncomfortable process,
although many people still preferred a bad photograph of themselves or of
their Aunt Beatrice or brother Charles to a drawing or to nothing.
Photographs had both the cachet of a novelty item and the unprecedented,
seemingly impossible ability to mirror reality.
Some memorable portraits did end up being made anyway: Léon Riesener's of
Delacroix captures that painter's idiomatic panache; Adolphe Humbert de
Molard's self-portrait, one eyebrow raised, head resting on two fingers,
looks charmingly animated and casual; Jean-Baptiste Sabatier-Blot's portrait
of his daughter beside a woman, who must be her mother, has the stiff
affection befitting mid-19th-century French bourgeois propriety, a mood
exactly opposite to the one struck in Louis-Auguste Bisson's portrait of a
dog, which probably belonged to the painter Rosa Bonheur, Bisson's surrogate
sister. Bisson sweetly framed the photograph in a sketch of a doghouse, a
precocious example of homespun photographic kitsch.
Speaking of kitsch, there is an extraordinary hand-colored and engraved
daguerreotype of a middle-aged man named Jean-Baptiste Meurice, the king of
the Incas of Valenciennes, a local philanthropic society, a 19th-century
French version of a Mummer, in elaborate regalia.
And then there is the anomalous daguerreotype of a man, unidentified, with
his mouth open, which, like billions of modern family snapshots that have
been lost or are thrown away, becomes a mystery of art untethered from its
original source.
French scientists took to the daguerreotype more readily than French
artists, for many of whom its exactitude seemed inartistic. The show
includes scientific daguerreotypes of fossils, some incidentally artful, and
documentary views of archaeological ruins and exotic locales. Baron
Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros went to Greece and produced exquisite pictures of
the Acropolis in Athens, where Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, another
neglected daguerreotype master, made one of the great daguerreotypes in the
Met's survey, a silvery, incandescent image of a palm tree. There is even a
daguerreotype of brewer's yeast made through a solar microscope by
Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault.
Early daguerreotypists were like chefs, each tinkering with the standard
recipe for preparing and developing plates and trying to devise new ways to
streamline the photographic process. They had some success. Exposure times
were sufficiently reduced that daguerreotypes came to record news, or
glimpses of it: the funeral of the Duc d'Orléans in 1842, with Notre Dame in
the background draped in black, and the barricades in the Faubourg du
Temple, before and after the attacks during the revolution in 1848.
Wood engravers still had to copy daguerreotypes to make images that could be
printed in newspapers, the caption "from a daguerreotype" accompanying the
published prints giving these handmade images a new authority and veracity.
"Because the medium of photography gives us reality stripped bare, without
art," Étienne Serres, an anatomist, wrote at the time, the daguerreotype
image had "a credibility that no other means could surpass."
I have left unmentioned until now the daguerreotype's other principal role,
namely as a purveyor of pornography. The pornographic potential of the new
medium was recognized and exploited instantly, as it would be more than a
century later after the invention of the Internet. This is the first Met
show in memory to include a stereoscopic peep show along with various
photographs (erotic or pornographic or neither, depending on your
perspective) featuring nude women, alone and in pairs, as well as one naked
man, slumped in a chair, eyes straight ahead, looking dazed, as if he had
perhaps just lost a game of strip poker.
Who knows whether this man was someone's erotic fantasy or an ethnographic
case study or an artist's model. Various artists, if they didn't
automatically dismiss the new medium of daguerreotypy, recognized the threat
it posed to their livelihood, and a few capitalized on its potential as an
aid to painting, a tool for storing visual information. (Ingres, for
example.) A few photographers even tried to make art with it, staging mostly
hokey tableaux vivants and composing landscapes. Choiselat, with a partner,
Stanislas Ratel, produced a view of a cottage on a lake, whose flat geometry
and mirror symmetry, as Mr. Daniel, the curator, points out, could have been
made only by people acclimated to the visual peculiarities of a photograph.
>From this sort of picture evolved a whole way of seeing the world that we
now call modern.
Although the daguerreotype had virtues that paper photographs did not, it,
like Betamax, died because the marketplace had its own priorities. For a
while daguerreotypy was a better medium than paper photographs, but the
latter product soon offered greater convenience, economy and
reproducibility. So daguerreotypes died.
But you might also say that in an age overrun by visual images,
photographers today like Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth make spectacular
color prints with digital means to recover something of the shock and
amazement daguerreotypes must have provoked when people first saw them.
But the best early daguerreotypes, like Choiselat's view across the Seine,
remain weirdly unlike any other photographs, with their own mysterious,
ethereal space. From Daguerre's invention photography got the seeds of its
talismanic aura: most people wouldn't casually rip up photographs of their
loved ones because it is still commonplace to believe, if only
unconsciously, that photographs somehow contain tidbits of the souls of
their subjects.
That is completely irrational and superstitious, of course. But you can see
where it comes from when you look at daguerreotypes. They are perfectly true
to life and somehow not of this world.
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