Biography 1

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (November 18, 1787 – July 10, 1851) was the French artist and chemist who is recognized for his invention of the Daguerreotype process of photography.

He was born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, France. He apprenticed in architecture, theater design, and panoramic painting. Exceedingly adept at his skill for theatrical illusion, he became a celebrated designer for the theater and later came to invent the Diorama, which opened in Paris in July 1822.

In 1827, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced the world's first permanent photograph (known as a Heliograph). Daguerre partnered with Niépce two years later, beginning a four-year cooperation. Niépce died suddenly in 1833. The main reason for the "partnership", as far as Daguerre was concerned, was connected to his already famous dioramas. Niepce was a printer and his process was based on a faster way to produce printing plates. Daguerre thought that the process developed by Niepce could help speed up his diorama creation.

Daguerre announced the latest perfection of the Daguerreotype, after years of experimentation, in 1839, with the French Academy of Sciences announcing the process on January 9 of that year. Daguerre's patent was acquired by the French Government, and, on August 19, 1839, the French Government announced the invention was a gift "Free to the World."

Though Daguerre obtained a pension from the Government, the deceased Niépce did not. Eventually his son fought for and won a pension from the government recognizing his father's work.

Daguerre died in Bry-sur-Marne, 12 km from Paris. A fine monument marks his grave there.

The work on the Daguerre process was taking place at the same time as that of Fox Talbot in England on the calotype process. Both men knew that they were working on a process that would revolutionize the art world. The Grand Tours which were so popular were illustrated by drawings of scenes and the "photographic" process would improve the quality and ease with which these popular holiday memories could be produced.

To protect his own invention, Daguerre himself registered the patent for Britain on August 12 (a week before France declared it "Free to the World"), and this greatly slowed the development of photography in that nation. Great Britain was to be the only place the patent was enforced. Antoine Claudet was one of the few people legally able to take daguerreotypes there.

Daguerre did not need to make money from the invention to live, since he had been pensioned by the French government. Fox Talbot spent a considerable amount of money on his process (est. £5,000 in 1830s money) and was keen to recover the costs which the Daguerre patent blocked.

The first permanent photograph was made in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, building on a discovery by Johann Heinrich Schultz (1724): a silver and chalk mixture darkens under exposure to light. Niépce and Daguerre refined this process. Daguerre first exposed silver-coated copper plates to iodine, obtaining silver iodide. Then he exposed them to light for several minutes. Then he coated the plate with mercury vapor heated to 75° Celsius, to amalgate the mercury with the silver, finally fixing the image in salt water. These ideas led to the famous Daguerreotype.

The resultant plate produced a mirror-like exact reproduction of the scene. The image was a mirror of the original scene. The image could only be viewed at an angle and needed protection from the air and fingerprints so was encased in a glass-fronted box.

Some ambrotypes were passed off as Daguerreotypes by being placed in these type of boxes. But the process was cheaper involving a weakly developed negative being placed on back card or paper to appear as a positive. Tintypes also were "boxed" as Daguerrotypes.

Daguerreotypes were usually portraits; the rarer views are much sought-after and are more expensive. The portrait process took several minutes and required the subjects to remain stock still. Samuel Morse was astonished to learn that Daguerrotypes of streets of Paris did not show any humans, until he realized that due to the long exposure times all moving objects became invisible. The time was later reduced with the "faster" lenses such as the Petzval's portrait lens, the first mathematically calculated lens.

The Daguerreotype was the Polaroid of the day, producing a single image which was not reproducible. Despite this drawback, millions of Daguerreotypes were produced. The system was not capable of reproduction, unlike the Talbot process; by 1851 when Daguerre died the Fox Talbot negative process was refined by the development of the wet collodion process, whereby a glass negative enabled a limitless number of sharp prints to be made. These developments made the Daguerreotype redundant and the process very soon disappeared.

Biography 2 - © Robert Leggat, 2000

b. 18 November 1787; d. 10 July 1851

Daguerre (pronounced Dagair) was perhaps the most famous of several people who invented photography.

He began work as an apprentice architect, and at the age of sixteen was an assistant stage designer in a Paris theatre, his elaborate stage designs winning him considerable acclaim. He had an astonishing ingenuity in the handling of light and lighting effects, and he supplied the scenic and lighting effects for a number of operas in theatres in Paris. He developed an impressive illusions theatre, which he termed Diorama; it was a picture show with changing light effects and huge paintings measuring 22 by 14 metres, of famous places. This became the rage in the early twenties.

He regularly used a camera obscura as an aid to painting in perspective, and this had led him to seek to freeze the image. In 1826 he learned of the work of Nicephore Niépce, and on 4 January 1829 signed up a partnership with him.

The partnership was a short one, Niépce dying in 1833, but Daguerre continued to experiment. He made an important discovery by accident. In 1835, so the story goes, he put an exposed plate in his chemical cupboard, and some days later found, to his surprise, that the latent image had developed. Daguerre eventually concluded that this was due to the presence of mercury vapour from a broken thermometer. This important discovery that a latent image could be developed made it possible to reduce the exposure time from some eight hours to thirty minutes.

Though he now knew how to produce an image, it was not until 1837 that he was able to fix them. This new process he called a Daguerreotype.

Daguerre advertised his process and sought sponsorship, but few seemed interested. He then turned to Francois Arago, a politician, who immediately saw the implications of this process, took his case up, and the French government commissioned a report on the process, to be chaired by Paul Delaroche. On 7 January 1839 an announcement was made of the discovery, but details were not divulged until 19 August when the process was announced publicly, the French government having bought the rights to the process from him, and given it free to the world. However, this process had also been patented in England and Wales on 14 August - only five days previously. As Lady Eastlake pointed out:

"...by some chicanery a patent for the daguerreotype was actually taken out in England, which for a time rendered this the only country which did not profit by the liberality of the French government. The early history of photography is not so generous in character as that of its maturity."

From the day the announcement was made of this new discovery, the process came to be used widely. The claim was made that the daguerreotype "requires no knowledge of drawing...." and that "anyone may succeed... and perform as well as the author of the invention."

The Literary Gazette for 7 January 1839 read:

"Paris, 6th January 1839.

We have much pleasure in announcing an important discovery made by M. Daguerre, the celebrated painter of the Diorama. This discovery seems like a prodigy. It disconcerts all the theories of science in light and optics and, if borne out, promises to make a revolution in the arts of design.

M. Daguerre has discovered a method to fix the images which are represented at the back of a camera obscura; so that these images are not the temporary reflection of the object, but their fixed and durable impress, which may be removed from the presence of those objects like a picture or an engraving."

An article in La Gazette de France, of the same date, also showed one of the limitations of the process:

"Nature in motion cannot reproduce itself, or at least can do so only with great difficulty, by the technique in question. In one of the boulevard views.... it happened that all which moved or walked did not appear in the drawing...."

The early daguerreotypes had several drawbacks.

• the length of the exposure necessary all but ruled out portraiture.
• the image was laterally reversed (as one sees oneself in a mirror). Many of the portraits reveal this from the way the coat was buttoned; if one required a picture the right way round, the camera would be pointed at a mirror reflecting the sitter's image. Initially this will not have bothered people, who were used only to seeing their mirror image in any case. (However, see Wolcott).
• it was very fragile.
• perhaps most limiting of all, it was a "once only" system; what was needed was a means whereby copies of a photograph might easily be made.

Taken in 1839, this picture of a boulevard gives the impression of empty streets, because with long exposures moving objects would not register.

However, there was an exception when a man stopped to have his shoes shined, (see bottom left of the larger picture) and though he and the person shining the shoes remain anonymous, they may have the distinction of being the first people ever to have been photographed.

In 1851 Daguerre died. In a sense this symbolically ended an era, for that very same year a new technique was invented, which was another milestone in photography - the wet collodion process by Frederick Scott Archer.

There is considerable material to be found in the Daguerrian Society's web-site. Do have a look.
 

Fotografías. Photographies

"Boulevard du Temple", taken by Daguerre in late 1838 or early 1839, was the first photograph of a person. The image shows a busy street, but because exposure time was over ten minutes, the traffic was moving too much to appear. The exception is the man at the bottom left, who stood still getting his boots polished long enough to

Still Life in Studio - 1937