Snapshots of the Past

Unidentified man, half-length daguerreotype portrait – Historic Photo Reproduction

Unidentified man, half-length daguerreotype portrait, 1844 — historic photograph
Unidentified man, half-length daguerreotype portrait, 1844. 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

A window into the past: Unidentified man, half-length daguerreotype portrait, preserved in this historic photograph. 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 has been bringing history to the wall since 2001, for tens of thousands of customers worldwide.

Unidentified man, half-length daguerreotype portrait

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A half-length daguerreotype from 1844 puts us in one of the earliest years that portrait photography was available to ordinary sitters. The process, announced in France in 1839, produced a single, mirror-like image on a silvered copper plate, so every surviving example is a unique object rather than a print from a negative. Because this sitter is unidentified, the picture rests on its material and its moment: the sitter would have held still for several seconds or more in bright light, and the plate's reflective surface still shows the mirror effect that viewers noticed at the time. Its lack of a name is common among these early portraits, since many were never labeled.

Created / published1844
Original scan3,279 × 4,096 px · prints to 11 × 14 in at 300 dpi
Reference431_Unidentified_man_halfle_1844

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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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