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The daguerreotype marked a milestone in photographic history as portraits became popular among politicians, celebrities, and the growing middle class. America's First Look into the Camera contains hundreds of portraits of both famous and anonymous men and offers insight into the people and policies of the nineteenth-century United States including politicians, the colonization of Liberia, effects of the Industrial Revolution, and reactions to high mortality rates. 1) America's First Exposure to Photography: The Daguerreotype Medium
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Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre invented the daguerreotype in 1839. Within a few years, daguerreotype studios appeared in United States cities and the popularity of the medium grew through the 1850s. A brief history of the daguerreotype medium, its camera, and its image processing are available in the collection's,"The Daguerreotype Medium." The collection's Glossary provides a list of relevant terms. Daguerreotypes were popularly and primarily used for portraits. Unlike most photographs today, in which images are printed from transparent negatives onto paper, the daguerreotype was a polished copper plate upon which an image was directly exposed. No negative was used in the process and so each daguerreotype was a unique, one-of-a-kind object. With its brilliant, mirror-like surface and its ornate case, small enough to hold in the hand or carry in the pocket, the daguerreotype was suited to a vivid and intimate representation of a loved one. |
 Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. |
 Abraham Lincoln. |
Despite its value as a means of memorializing friends and family, photography did not have an immediate market. In fact, it was photography's almost magical ability to reproduce life that elicited fear and suspicion from many people. In an effort to assuage anxieties about the medium and to gain public credibility, photographers sought to take and to display portraits of America's elite. In an age when phrenologists offered to read a person's character based on their physical characteristics, portraits of society's leaders were thought to have an edifying and moralizing influence on the viewer. Portraits of esteemed personages such as Lyman Beecher, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Dolley Madison, and Abraham Lincoln drew the public to the photographers' studios and provided the genesis for a cult of celebrity that would grow with the evolution of photography. |
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 Lyman Beecher. |
 Niagara Falls. |
Some artists brought the daguerreotype outside of the portrait studio to capture images of buildings and places. In addition to hundreds of portraits, this collection also contains pictures of Niagara Falls, an American Indian camp, and a monument commemorating a battle from the War of 1812. Washington, D.C. locations featured in the collection include the General Post Office, and the Patent Office. Many daguerreotype images were later reproduced as engravings and drawings in newspapers and other periodicals. |
For an understanding of how portrait photography evolved after the daguerreotype, browse American Memory collections, including Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian, William P. Gottlieb: Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazz, America from the Great Depression to World War II, Creative Americans: Portraits by Carl Van Vechten, 1932-1964, and By Popular Demand: "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920.
| Many galleries displayed images of politicians to entice the public to visit and to sit for a portrait. Searches on terms such as Democrat, Whig, and Republican yield portraits of some of the major figures from the U.S. political parties. Images of Democratic presidents such as Andrew Jackson and James Polk might be compared to ideological adversaries such as Henry Clay, a Whig senator and 1844 presidential candidate, and the 1848 Whig candidate President Zachary Taylor with his cabinet. Republican Abraham Lincoln is also represented in portraits as a clean-shaven senator and as a familiar presidential figure. Additional searches on terms such as senator, congressman, and governor also produce a number of local politicians from the different parties. |  Andrew Jackson. |
 Zachary Taylor. |
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| In 1817, the American Colonization Society established the settlement of Liberia on the west coast of Africa. This colony was created in part for free African Americans to enjoy the civil rights denied to them in the United States. While some documents in the American Memory collection, From Slavery to Freedom, question whether Liberia was a land of opportunity or an opportunity to avoid civil rights issues in the United States, it is clear that many African Americans moved to the colony to start a new life. The American Memory collection, Maps of Liberia, 1830-1870, features a timeline history of Liberia from its early days as a colony to its recognition as an independent nation in 1847. |  Philip Coker. |
 Stephen Allen Benson. |
 Joseph Jenkins Roberts. |
A search on Liberia in this collection yields a number of portraits from the American Colonization Society. Images include Liberian presidents Joseph Jenkins Roberts and Stephen Allen Benson, senators Edward Morris and Edward Roye, Senate Chaplain Philip Coker, and a number of anonymous colonists. |
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 Edward Morris. |
 Edward Roye. |
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Workers during the first half of the nineteenth century faced a series of transitions in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Inventions such as the steam engine and the cotton gin prompted the creation of assembly lines and factory systems as Americans began discovering the benefits of mass production. At the same time, many craftsmen faced a transitional time as mechanization threatened their livelihoods. A search on occupational portrait yields a number of images documenting the different disciplines of this industrial age. Traditional workers such as a blacksmith, carpenter, latch maker, watchmaker, clergyman, and stonecutter are featured along with people whose jobs were byproducts of the Industrial Revolution such as a woman working at a sewing machine, a man in front of an engine, and men on a crank handcar on the tracks of a railroad. |
 Occupational portrait of a blacksmith. |
 Occupational Portrait of a Peddler. |
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 Occupational Portrait of a Woman Working at a Sewing Machine. |
 Benjamin Family Group Portrait. |
People living in the nineteenth-century United States endured a higher mortality rate than subsequent generations and the memorialization of loved ones held special importance in the all too frequent grieving process. Those with more money could afford to have portraits of family members drawn or painted. Death masks placed over a person's face, shoulders, and sometimes hands just after death were also popular. The advent of photography made it possible for the middle class to afford portraits as well. If a portrait was not made prior to death, it was not unusual to obtain one after the fact. Portraits drawn or photographed just after death were often said to capture a heavenly look of serenity, suggesting that the horrible inevitability of death also held a beauty. |
| Daguerreotypes often required a subject to remain still for several minutes to ensure that the image would not blur. Some subjects were more still than others. It is unclear exactly when Mary Gideon sat for her portrait in 1853, but the notes in this collection indicate that she died the year that the image was taken. Such a memorial was likely to have been displayed in a special place in the family's home or embedded on a tombstone. Another potential post-mortem daguerreotype comes in the form of the Adams family portrait featuring a somber couple dressed in black holding what appears to be their sleeping daughter on their lap. Animals, too, may have been so cherished as to have been memorialized in photographs such as that of an unidentified man with a cat in his lap. |  Adams Family Portrait. |
 Unidentified Man with Cat. |
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The daguerreotypes available in America's First Look into the Camera provide an opportunity to assess the value of research tools such as timelines and visual biographies. The subtle details within occupational portraits of tradesmen and other working classes can be interpreted to determine the status of each group in the nineteenth-century United States. Portraits of politicians provide a starting point to gain a better understanding of the rise and fall of the Whig Party. These and other images also allow a number of opportunities for future historical research. Chronological Thinking: Timeline and BiographyThe collection's Timeline of the Daguerrian Era provides a brief history of the United States from 1839 to 1860. It also provides the opportunity to understand that timelines are interprative tools that enhance the study of history by focusing on select events at the expense of other historical moments. Assess this collection's timeline by identifying the specific themes and ideas that it emphasizes and those themes and ideas that are left out.
Historical Comprehension: The Whig Party
Searches
on Whig and Democrat provide a number of portraits of
various Congressmen associated with both parties. These portraits
can be organized according to political affiliation and used to create
an illustrative timeline documenting the rise and fall of the Whig
Party. Historical Analysis and Interpretation: Portraiture
Historical Issue-Analysis and Decision-Making: The Rise of Photography to an Art
Brady never operated the camera himself, but was celebrated as the designer of the portrait, posing his subjects and eliciting the desired expression. Brady was soon heralded as the champion of a growing art form that not only reproduced the subject's image, but also expressed the subject's true character. By the 1860s, the popularity of celebrity portraits had developed
into a craze for collecting small copies of these portraits and organizing
them into albums. These small portraits, or cartes-de-visite,
sold well, but Brady never liked these cheap copies. He preferred
the Imperial portraits he had created when paper photographs replaced
daguerreotypes. These large-format portraits were often retouched
with inks and paints to give them the uniqueness and status of paintings.
The uniqueness of the Imperials gave them a higher value, but one
that was not easily marketable. Eventually, Brady's business failed
as he refused to put aside his artistic pretensions to cater to middle-class
customers.
Historical Research Capabilities
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America's First Look into the Camera offers portraits of authors, politicians, tradesmen, and other people in the nineteenth-century United States. These images can be used to spark biographical and critical assessments of an author's work. Other portraits can be used in creative writing projects and can prompt the analysis of the evolution of media outlets from their origins in the 1830s. Walt Whitman and the Picture GalleryIn a July 2, 1846, edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, editor Walt Whitman described daguerreotype portraits as a spectacle:
Whitman celebrated the connection that a viewer has with the subject of a portrait and noted, "An electric chain seems to vibrate . . . between our brain and him or her preserved there so well by the limner's cunning. Time, space, both are annihilated, and we identify the semblance with the reality." Whitman made reference, again, to this spectacle in his poem, "My Picture Gallery."
Whitman's biographer, David S. Reynolds, observed in Walt Whitman's America, that "photography was an essential metaphor behind [Whitman's] democratic aesthetic." This collection provides the opportunity to examine Whitman's work with an understanding of the impact of early photography in mind.
Creative Writing
Browse the collection's photographs and imagine either what it would have been like to see such images in a daguerreotype gallery or to sit for a portrait. Describe this experience as if writing about it in a letter to a friend.
Literary Biography
Ichabod Crane
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 Ichabod Crane. |
Authors often choose names for their characters that reinforce certain qualities about them. When Washington Irving wrote his classic tale, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," he named the protagonist, terrorized by the Headless Horseman, Ichabod Crane. This collection, however, contains a portrait of the real Ichabod Crane, a U.S. Army colonel who Irving met when the soldier was stationed in Sackett's Harbor, New York during the War of 1812. |  Washington Irving. |
| The New York Herald and other "penny papers" often competed with papers of integrity such as Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. Greeley founded the Tribune in 1841 and provided space for intellectual discussions of politics, social reform, and news. Searches on editor and journalist provide portraits of newspapermen such as Horace Greeley, James Gordon Bennett, and members of the New York Tribune editorial staff. A search on news also results in an 1853 image of a man stranded on a log in Niagara Falls that provides an early example of a news photograph. |  James Gordon Bennett. |
 Horace Greeley. |
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| Last updated 09/26/2002 |
