From: Robert W. Schramm (schrammrus@hotmail.com)
Date: 09/26/03-05:45:26 PM Z
Daguerreotypes do contain parts of the soul, but it is the soul of the
daguerreotypist. ;-)
Check out my web page at:
>From: Martin Reis <mreis@tafelmusik.org>
>Reply-To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
>To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
>Subject: The Eerie Exactness of the Daguerrotype (Review in NY Times)
>Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 14:13:46 -0400
>
>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.
>
>---
>Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
>Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
>Version: 6.0.521 / Virus Database: 319 - Release Date: 09/23/2003
>
_________________________________________________________________
Instant message during games with MSN Messenger 6.0. Download it now FREE!
http://msnmessenger-download.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : 10/01/03-03:09:00 PM Z CST