As the daguerreotype itself is on a relatively thin sheet of soft metal, it was easily sheared down to sizes and shapes suited for mounting into lockets, as was done with miniature paintings.[79] Other imaginative uses of daguerreotype portraits were to mount them in watch fobs and watch cases, jewel caskets and other ornate silver or gold boxes, the handles of walking sticks, and in brooches, bracelets and other jewelry now referred to by collectors as "daguerreian jewelry".[80] The cover glass or crystal was sealed either directly to the edges of the daguerreotype or to the opening of its receptacle and a protective hinged cover was usually provided.
My Likeness Taken: Daguerreian Portraits In America
By 1853, an estimated three million daguerreotypes per year were being produced in the United States alone.[124] One of these original Morse Daguerreotype cameras is currently on display at the National Museum of American History, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C.[125] A flourishing market in portraiture sprang up, predominantly the work of itinerant practitioners who traveled from town to town. For the first time in history, people could obtain an exact likeness of themselves or their loved ones for a modest cost, making portrait photographs extremely popular with those of modest means. Celebrities and everyday people sought portraits and workers would save an entire day's income to have a daguerreotype taken of them, including occupational portraits.[126]
VIRTUALLY FROM ITS INCEPTION, photography has been involved with portraiture, continuing in a new medium the impulse to represent human form that goes back to the dawn of art. The daguerreotype and negative-positive technologies provided the basis for flourishing commercial enterprises that satisfied the needs for public and private likenesses, while individuals who wished to express them-selves personally through portraiture were able to do so using the calotype and collodion processes. Approaches to camera likenesses, whether made for amateur or commercial purposes, ranged from documentary to artistic, from "materialistic" to "atmospheric," but whatever their under-lying aesthetic mode, photographic portraits reflected from their origin the conviction that an individual's personality, intellect, and character can be revealed through the depiction of facial configuration and expression.
That the photograph might provide a more efficient method than either physionotrace or silhouette to produce faithful likenesses seems obvious today, but when first announced, neither Daguerre's nor Talbot's process was capable of being used to make portraits. In 1839, sittings would have required about 15 minutes of rigid stillness in blazing sunshine owing to the primitive nature of the lenses used and the insufficient sensitivity to light of the chemically treated plates and paper. Because the highly detailed daguerreotype was considered by many the more attractive of the two processes and, in addition, was unrestricted in many localities, individuals in Europe and the United States scrambled to find the improvements that would make commercial daguerreotype portraits possible. They were aided in their purpose by the general efforts in progress to improve the process for all kinds of documentation.
The taking of likenesses by daguerreotype spread more slowly through the rest of Europe during the 1840s and '50s. Investigations have turned up a greater amount of activity than once was thought to exist, but, other than in the larger cities, portrait work in Central Europe was done mainly by itinerants. However, much of that was lost in the nationalistic and revolutionary turmoils of the 19th century. In a number of countries, the daguerreotype and, later, photography on paper and glass came to be considered apt tools for ethnic self-realization. One example entitled A Magyar Fold es Nepei (The Land of Hungary and Its People), published in 1846/47, was illustrated with lithographs based on daguerreotypes thought to have been made by Janos Varsanyi, and included ethnographic portraits as well as the expected images of landscape and monuments.
The absolute frontality in Draper's portrait of Catherlishmints in 14 cities, is typical of this style. As in the Draper image, the portrait of Mrs. Francis Luqueer (pi. no. 39), taken in one of the Plumbe studios, fills the space frontally and centrally, with no attempt at artistic pose, dramatic lighting, or grandiloquent props such as the drapery swags and statuary found in European daguerreotype portraits. This style must have appealed to Americans in part because of its similarity to the solemn portraits by native limners, exemplified in the likeness of Mrs. John Vincent Storm (pi. no. 40) by Ammi Phillips, made just a few years earlier. Nor was the sober approach limited to ordinary folk; the same directness and lack of artifice is seen in an 1847 daguerreotype, by an unknown maker, of the future abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass (pi. no. 41) . In this work, the absence of artistic pretension is modine, the result of his scientific intent, is nevertheless emblematic of the approach taken by a great many early daguerreotypists in America. The work of John Plumbe, an enterprising businessman out to make a success of selling equipment, supplies, and lessons as well as inexpensive likenesses, who opened a studio in Boston in 1841 and by the mid-'40s was the owner of a chain of portrait establishmints in 14 cities, is typical of this style. As in the Draper image, the portrait of Mrs. Francis Luqueer (pi. no. 39), taken in one of the Plumbe studios, fills the space frontally and centrally, with no attempt at artistic pose, dramatic lighting, or grandiloquent props such as the drapery swags and statuary found in European daguerreotype portraits. This style must have appealed to Americans in part because of its similarity to the solemn portraits by native limners, exemplified in the likeness of Mrs. John Vincent Storm (pi. no. 40) by Ammi Phillips, made just a few years earlier. Nor was the sober approach limited to ordinary folk; the same directness and lack of artifice is seen in an 1847 daguerreotype, by an unknown maker, of the future abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass (pi. no. 41) . In this work, the absence of artistic pretension is moderated by the sense of powerful psychological projection, by the suggestion of a distinctive presence.
The situation was different in Scotland, where, as noted in Chapter I, Talbot's associate Sir David Brewster was instrumental in introducing the calotype to David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (see Profile). In an endeavor to record the 400 or so likenesses to be included in a painting that Hill decided to make in 1843 commemorating the separation of the Church of Scotland from the Church of England, the two became so caught up in photography that they also produced hundreds of commanding portraits of individuals who had no relationship to the religious issues that were the subject of the painting. Aware that the power of the calotype lay in the fact that it looked like the "imperfect work of man ...and not the perfect work of God," Hill and Adamson used the rough texture of the paper negative to create images with broad chiaroscuro effects that were likened by contemporaries to the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Rembrandt.
A small number of composed photographic portraits attempt to reunite families visually by posing living subjects with likenesses of their departed kin. The pair of daguerreotypes cased together in Figure 9 depicts a mother and her three young children about 1847. Tenderly displayed in both is a miniature watercolor portrait of a young man, presumably their recently deceased husband and father, by Rufus Porter. The daguerreotype in Figure 1 portrays a mother dressed in mourning beside a likeness of her child painted by William Matthew Prior (1806-1873), the original of which is now in the National Gallery of Art (Fig. 2). As is common, the photograph shows the original painting in reverse. Figure 10, however, represents an instance where the photographer used a reversing prism or mirror to make a positive image, here of a watercolor memorial of about 1838 for Mary Perkins Dorr and her daughter Mary Lucretia Dorr. This option, which would have been available from accomplished photographers at an additional cost, assured that the inscription on the tomb was readable for posterity.
Adams, who sat for more than 60 portraits throughout his life, was intrigued by the uncanny likenesses produced by the new medium of photography, even if he wasn't always charmed by the results. In his diary on March 8, 1843, he recorded his first visit to the Washington studio of Philip Haas, where he'd sat for three daguerreotypes. (Daguerreotypes, which are made directly onto chemically treated plates, are unique objects; no negatives are involved.)
Some of the most memorable daguerreian portraits are of hunters and military men. These portraits capture their subjects at their proudest moments, and in full sartorial display, sometimes brandishing their weapons. Many soldiers had their portraits made as keepsakes for their families just before deploying to active service. Unfortunately, daguerreotype technology with its long exposure time was not able to record a battle in progress. By the time of the Civil War, photographers such as Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner had switched to the more versatile technique of the albumen print made from a collodion-on-glass negative. 2ff7e9595c
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