Snapshots of the Past

Daguerreotype street scene with brick buildings and a horse cart – Historic Photograph Print

Daguerreotype street scene with brick buildings and a horse cart, 1842 — historic photograph
Daguerreotype street scene with brick buildings and a horse cart, 1842. Historic photograph from the Daguerreotypes & Early Photography collection.

(Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)

Description

This rare historic photograph captures Daguerreotype street scene with brick buildings and a horse cart in remarkable detail. It is part of the Snapshots of the Past archive, gathered over 25 years of research.

Framed, it is ready for the wall; unframed, it is ready for the frame you choose. Perfect for a home, office, library or classroom wall, and a gift with a story behind it. Free shipping in the lower 48 states. Snapshots of the Past, founded in 2001, has served tens of thousands of customers worldwide.

Daguerreotype street scene with brick buildings and a horse cart

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A street scene captured in 1842 is among the earliest surviving kinds of photographic record, since exposures of that era needed minutes of stillness and so moving traffic usually vanished from the plate. Here the brick buildings and a horse cart stand fixed in silvery detail, the cart's presence telling us that something was in motion even if the image cannot show it. Daguerreotypes like this were made on polished silver-coated copper, which gives them a mirror-like surface that shifts with the viewer's angle. Worth noticing is how the long exposure rendered the street as an empty, orderly place, a quality that makes these early views feel both precise and strangely quiet.

Created / published1842
Original scan3,310 × 4,096 px · prints to 11 × 14 in at 300 dpi
Reference112_North_side_of_Chestnut_1842

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Snapshots of the Past helps heritage brands, museums, historians and storytellers tell stories with history: historic prints, image licensing and historical storytelling drawn from more than 25 years of research and curation.

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