the.com/daguerreotype
The first photograph that mirrored you back, silver-faced and fragile as a held breath.
means An early photographic process, and the image it produced, in which a picture was fixed onto a polished, silver-coated copper plate, yielding a sharp, mirror-like, one-of-a-kind image.
from Named for Louis Daguerre, the French artist and inventor who developed the process and announced it to the world in 1839. The word stitches his surname to the Greek -type ('impression, image'), so it literally means 'a Daguerre impression' — a man's name pressed permanently into the language, just as light was pressed into silver.
- mirror image
- Tilts between negative and positive depending on viewing angle
- mercury vapor
- Developed over toxic fumes that slowly poisoned its makers
- french bonus
- France bought the patent and gifted it to the world
- long sits
- Early portraits required minutes of frozen, unblinking stillness
- one of one
- Each is unique with no negative to reprint
robert cornelius self-portrait — philadelphia, 1839, considered the first american photographic self-portrait
edgar allan poe daguerreotype — taken circa 1849, one of the few known photographs of the author