JHill

Finally back from the holidays… Last weekend we went to see the Daguerreotype exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Daguerre was a painter, engraver, dioramist. There’s some of his painting and engraving work at the Met, you can usually pick it out from across the room. In building his dioramas, the realism was important, so he used the camera obscura and the camera lucida. I’d like to picture Daguerre deciding on what to capture and then being frustrated about having to go through the drudgery of actually doing the capturing, which I realize is undoubtedly my own automation projections onto his life — once I started in with photography and its immediacy, I didn’t draw seriously again. Daguerre, with help from a partner and early rival, Niépce, got the process down. Daguerre patented the invention in England and at the same time, sold the rights to the French government for a hefty pension for himself and Niépce’s son. The French government gave the details of the process away as a gift to the world. People were buying this stuff like crazy, it was Daguerreotypomania. It was the gotta-have-it new toy. It was really exciting to watch the roll of historical technological (r)evolution happen in slow motion walking through the exhibit. When they got the process working faster to capture not just still buildings and people, but events as they were happening, it must have been an unbelievable time.