After photography had been invented in the first half of the 19th Century, available technologies left much to be desired. The daguerreotype relied on mercury fumes (mercury is a neurotoxin), and it required not only considerable skill and preparation on part of the photographer, it was also excruciatingly slow. Initially, there was no flash, and when a form of it arrived later, it literally was an explosion of, again, hazardous materials.
There was immediate demand for photographs, mostly in the form of portraits. People flocked to the many portrait studios that opened up in many places to have their portraits taken. For almost all of those customers, this would have been the very first time in the history of their family that someone made an image bearing their likeness. And it was relatively affordable.
Indoors, producing a daguerreotype was relatively straight forward. As I noted, the materials were difficult to control. But the confines of a building offered enough stability to do so. All you needed was a big window to provide the light. Your customers needed a lot of patience, given the time required to arrive at a proper exposure.
The moment you left the studio setting, things became a lot more complicated. As a photographer, you needed to bring all of your materials, which not only included the toxic chemicals but also the sheets of silver-plated copper that carried the images. You wouldn’t be able to hop into your truck or station wagon because cars had not been invented, yet. Instead, you would have to rely on some wooden cart that probably would have been drawn by a horse or a donkey.
Some photographers did exactly that: they went outdoors and produced daguerreotypes of or in the landscapes, villages, or cities they wanted to photograph. What this looked like in the context of the United States is now available as The Scenic Daguerreotype in America 1840-1860, a handsome catalogue produced at the occasion of an exhibition at the Wardsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
As you might imagine, the selection of images in the book is very diverse, both in terms of what was photographed but also who took the pictures. There is, for example, a Cincinnati street scene by James Presley Ball, an African American photographer, abolitionist, and businessman (it’s his only surviving outdoor view).
In fact, for each of the photographs in the book, there is a short text that explains its relevance. Some of it might be more or less obvious, some of it less so. And more often than not, those texts make you aware of something in the frame that a first, casual glance might have missed.
Or maybe as a viewer, you might simply not be aware of why what you’re looking at is relevant or noteworthy. In the case of Ball’s photograph, Deborah Willis focuses on three Black men who probably were in the middle of supplying a store with a load of candy boxes. “Black labor,” Willis writes, “was crucial to industrial and commercial growth in US cities and globally, and particularly evident on sugarcane plantations.”
And there are many more images that offer a glimpse into the United States before the Civil War. In an infinity of ways, it was a vastly different country than it is now, even as some of the dark undercurrents have now burst back out into the open again.
If the past is indeed a foreign country, photography’s role might be more limited than many of us would love to think. It’s doubtful whether photography can help us understand the past. What it can do, though, is to help us understand our present — as long as we reflect on what we see in photographs and how we come to the conclusions we come to.
In other words, seeing is one thing; understanding how we see is quite another.
Daguerreotypes essentially were mirrors, which required effort to see the ghostly images on their surfaces. Turned the wrong way, a viewer would only see their own face or maybe something else in the same room reflected.
The Scenic Daguerreotype in America 1840-1860 presents some of the earliest ghostly images from the United States, a country that wasn’t even a century old at the time. Some of the locales had been colonized long before; others were still being subjected to it.
It’s worthwhile keeping in mind that while it might be cool to see the gold diggers in some of the daguerreotypes, the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians triggered the California Genocide at exactly that time.
In photography, it matters what you can see in a picture because it also points at what is not being shown.
The Scenic Daguerreotype in America 1840-1860; photographs from numerous sources; edited by Allen Phillips and Grant B. Romer; texts by Matthew Hargraves, Allen Phillips, Grant B. Romer, and Deborah Willis; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art/Paul Holberton Publishing; 2025
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