During the 1820s and 1830s, the inventor of the daguerreotype, Louis Daguerre, managed a diorama business in Paris. Dioramas were theatrical narratives based on both travellers tales and historical events and were presented to the public against over-sized pictorial backdrops. By the 1820s, they had made Daguerre, who also painted these huge pictures, a very wealthy man. But in the 1830s the popularity of the diorama began to wane. This, combined with the level of work needed to paint the backdrops, led Daguerre to seek a less time consuming method of painting these landscape and architectural scenes.

Daguerre went into business with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, another Frenchman, who had earlier made what is considered the earliest extant photograph. Using bitumen Niépce had succeeded in taking a blurry image from his window in Le Gras, France, in 1827, but it was not until Daguerre became involved that they were able to develop, the daguerreotype. This photographic process produced a unique positive print on a silver coated copper plate and in January, 1839, after the death of Niépce, Daguerre unveiled this process to the world.

As it turned out, early photography was predominantly linked to portraiture, as this was the only viable means of making money. The uptake of the camera for outdoor photography was limited until technical problems were resolved which brought down exposure times and allowed smaller cameras to be made. Outdoor daguerreotypes remain rarer finds for collectors, and from 1839 to 1851, the daguerreotype, although the most popular form of photography was mostly employed in taking portraits.

The daguerreotype was also a remarkably complex process, so complex in fact that the overlooking of even the smallest details could result in a botched photograph. For those of us used to the digital camera's snap, download, and enhancement with digital software, it is worth taking a moment to illustrate just how complex these processes could be.

To make a daguerreotype you firstly had to clean a piece of silver plate to a mirror finish using a slurry made from pumice in oil, then give it a number of washings in nitric acid and water to remove the oil residue. Secondly the prepared plate had to be sensitised by exposing it to iodine vapour. Then the sensitised plate was placed in a camera and exposed to light, the exposure time varied according to the time of the day, the season of the year and the weather, and could be from three to thirty minutes. The silver plate was then exposed over heated mercury vapour until an image appeared and lastly it was fixed by placing the plate in a hot solution of common salt or a solution of sodium thiosulfate.

Keeping a supply of the correct chemicals, making sure the plates and workspace were kept free of dust and ensuring there was a supply of clean water all conspired to limit the practicality of travelling with a camera. This coupled with the lengthy exposure times, which were a result of deficiencies of these early photographic emulsions and the quality of the camera's lens, made the whole process complicated and unwieldy.

In 1851 Daguerre died and this perhaps fortunately saved him from seeing the demise of his invention. In this same year a wet-collodion photographic process on glass, the ambrotype was introduced which was cheaper and could be viewed more easily than the daguerreotypes reflective surface. The first ambrotypes were introduced into Sydney by Lynne Brown in 1854 and as in other parts of the world effectively sounded the death knell for the daguerreotype process. Although still in demand from conservative customers, and those who appreciated their high level of the detail, daguerreotype had essentially disappeared by the early 1860s.

Geoff Barker, Curatorial, September 2009

References
M. Barger and W. White, The Daguerreotype: Nineteenth-Century Technology and Modern Science, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington and London, 1991
Janet Burger, French Daguerreotypes, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989
Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, A Concise History of Photography, Thames and Hudson, Germany, 1965
Rudolf, Kingslake, A History of the Photographic Lens, Academic Press Limited, San Diego, California, 1989
Naomi Rosenblum, World History of Photography, Abbeville Press, New York, 1984
R. Derek Wood, History of Photography, Vol 17, No.3, 1993

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