Daguerreotypes & Early Photography

A daguerreotype is a photograph with no negative. Each one is a single image on a sheet of silvered copper, polished to a mirror finish, and there is no second copy anywhere. When you look at one you are looking at the exact surface that sat inside the camera.

Louis Daguerre announced his process in Paris in 1839, and it reached America within months. One of the first Americans to try it was Robert Cornelius, a Philadelphia lamp maker, who made a portrait of himself that fall, standing outside with his arms crossed and his hair a mess. It is often called the earliest American portrait photograph, and it is in the Library of Congress.

The early process was slow. Sitters had to stay still for long exposures, at first a minute or more, and studios used iron head braces hidden behind the chair to keep them steady. That is why so many daguerreotype faces look stern. Smiling for that long was hard work. Improvements soon cut the time to a few seconds, and portrait studios opened in every American city of any size during the 1840s.

Daguerreotypes were fragile, so they were sealed under glass and set in small hinged cases lined with velvet. The image is mirror-reversed, so a man's coat buttons up on the wrong side and any lettering reads backward. By the late 1850s the daguerreotype was being replaced by the ambrotype, the tintype and paper prints from glass negatives, which were cheaper and could be copied.

The collection here holds more than 700 daguerreotypes, mostly portraits. Look at the hands, which sitters often struggled to keep still and which sometimes blur. Look at the hand-tinting, too. Many studios added a touch of pink to the cheeks or gold to a ring or watch chain. These were the first people in history to see themselves exactly as a camera saw them.