Introduction to the History of Photography

The first photograph was a view from a window; among the early daguerreotypes by the inventor of the process, we see depicted in one, a view of a Parisian boulevard, in another, a still life with artistic or art related objects.  We can therefore state that Nature, and Art and Architecture, were congenial subjects in early photography. Immobile and under sunlight, landscape and architectural subjects were indeed suitable to the initial technical conditions of the medium.  Romanticism, with its pantheistic view of nature, provided the initial context of ideas and forms of feeling in which the new technological image could at first express, for a century facing the experience of the acceleration of time, the hopes and fears of history itself:  landscape photography both developed and transformed the Romantic sublime.  As product and process, as, at the same time, instrument and result, photography registered and expressed, as much as it helped to shape, the great ...

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The notion of what we may call an “artless art” was applied at different times, and with different intentions, to photography and the Daguerreotype. The image produced “directly” by nature, bypassing the intervention of the hand of the artist, was the object of amazement at first, and praised for its astounding fidelity of detail: an “art form” therefore that “no painter could ever match”.  The popularization of the daguerreotype as the 19th century progressed, brought about by technical improvements allowing for the mass production of images and specially, for the first time, the mass production of portraits, produced also as a counter-current, a kind of  “over familiarity” with the daguerreotype portrait. And with it, a relative weariness about the repetitious, the unstudied, the narrowly documentary and "vulgar" or commonplace qualities (issues only partially explained by inherent  limitations of the Daguerreotype technique for portraiture, such as exposure time requi...

  A Camera Obscura experiment in Venice from  from BBC's 'Genius of Photography source: YouTube  Genius of Photography website

The following are examples of the art of the Daguerreotype as practiced today by specialized studios and labs. From the site: TheDagLab.com. Here their Gallery of Portraits .  And here an explanation of the process

  Malcolm Daniels, Curator of the Dept of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, talks about the Daguerreotype process source: YouTube