In the Name of Daguerreotypes and Calotypes

The camera obscura is a completely darkened chamber with a small opening pointed at the world. Through this aperture, an image of the world is projected onto a wall. It took centuries from the initial observation of this phenomenon to the human ability to fix the image for repeated experience. For this reason, photography has countless contributors in its conception, and the process took a few centuries. In a similar sentiment, Kaja Silverman’s introduction to her book, The History of Photography, Part I, paints the medium “as impossible to know when [it] began as it is to know when our first ancestors opened their eyes” (13). This analogy of sight, enlightenment, and ancestry continues to follow photography throughout the medium’s existence. In this process, two prominent figures developed physical and chemical methodologies in which to open “their eyes” and to fix a an image onto a substrate. Their names are Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (b. 1787) and William Henry Fox Talbot (b. 1800) (Marien, 3, 9). Their contributions to photography relate directly to the name they gave the technologies they discovered and developed. In other words, the development of the daguerreotype and the calotype by Daguerre and Talbot respectively reflect the photographers’ economic and artistic intentions of the types of photographies they created. Daguerre drives the invention as a niche and lucrative business opportunity in contrast to Talbot’s efforts in improving the rendering methods of drawing and art itself.

At the most basic label, Daguerre and Talbot relied on the invention and development of the camera obscura in order to focus, capture, and imprint the latent image onto a photosensitive substrate (Silverman, 14). However, the optical device holds different values and psycologies for the photographers. For one, Daguerre’s essay on his invention holds a tone of a utilitarian ease for the unskilled user of the apparatus as a technology that requires no “…knowledge of chemistry and physics, it will be possible to take…the most detailed views” (qtd. In Silverman, 25). Daguerre claims that it will “greatly please ladies” (qtd. In Marien, 16). It resembles an advertisement of a new product or service. In contrast, Talbot centers the choice of image as part of the role of the “artist” by aiming “the apparatus before the image he requires…At the end of the time he returns, takes out his picture, and finds it finished” (qtd. In Silverman, 26). Both Daguerre and Talbot appreciated the utility and ease of capturing images. Daguerre saw an economic opportunity to bring his experience working with Joseph Niépce (b. 1765) and his knowledge of spectacle in dioramas to the growing middle-class in France (Marien, 10, 13). Talbot saw the ease of the technology differently. He ponders, “…how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves…upon the paper” (qtd. Marien, 19). This observation comes after the failure of using the camera lucida to draw landscapes in Italy. (Marien, 19). Both photographers’ attitudes towards their inventions inform how they name their creations.

In naming his invention a daguerreotype, Daguerre claims ownership and credit of the technology. In this action, Daguerre “installs himself in the position of the giver” (Silverman, 26). This also allows Daguerre to benefit from “any economic success [the daguerreotype] may have” (Tanzi, Lecture 2). In Figure 1, Daguerre “gives” the viewer a still life showing objects of varied shapes, sizes, and textures. In this regard, Daguerre illustrates his invention’s ability to render the detail and likeness of the objects in front of the camera. This does not discredit Daguerre’s own aesthetic abilities, in fact, perhaps, this makes Daguerre the first commercial photographer in a contemporary understanding of the profession. Daguerre combines his compositional skills in arranging geometries, light, and shadow into an appealing work of art and a commercial image. He uses his intelligence and skills to create a business. It seems that Daguerre had an intention to align himself with the “the business people, bureaucrats, and managers [that] were part of an emerging elite based not on birth but on intelligence and hard work” (Marien, 13). It is even suggested that Daguerre exploited the labor and research of Niépce, prior to the public release of the daguerreotype because “he wanted to establish himself as the source of the photographic image” (Silverman, 43). In that, he was successful, Daguerre contributed, with the help of the French government, to the widespread use of his invention, known as “daguerreomania” at the time (Tanzi, Lecture 3).

In poetic contrast to Daguerre, Talbot names his photographic process the calotype, after the word kalos, “the Greek word for beauty” (Marien, 20). At the center of this naming convention, Talbot has placed emphasis on the object and image, as oppose to its maker. He was fascinated with the process of the appearance of a latent image, this process, he says that only a “few things in the range of science [are] more surprising than the gradual appearance of the picture on the blank sheet” (Silverman, 51). The calotype was an object to admire, to gaze, and to experience as it changed over time. In Figure 2, the viewer sees a small photograph of a window mounted with a handwritten note attachment: “When first made, the squares of glass about 200 could be counted, with the help of a lens.” Talbot relates the viewing of a photograph as an active exploration of an image, an image that reveals more or less as time passes. To count the “square of glass…with the help of a lens,” Talbot must have spent more time looking at the photograph than most people today spend on looking at scores of images. Inherently, Talbot provided the world “the first viable photographic process to able to produce multiple copies of the same image” (Tanzi, Lecture 3). As a result, Talbot expands on the lineage of printmakers in art history creating a new method in which to produce multiples for distribution. In the end, Talbot’s primary interest in photography became its beauty, not its reproduction. He writes in a passage from The Pencil of Nature, “…[the photograph] may awaken a train of thought and feelings, and picturesque imaginings” (qtd. In Silverman, 54). The calotype is thus, by its name, an object that hints at beauty.

The contributions of Daguerre and Talbot have made the photographic image a centerpiece in everyday contemporary existence. Of course, the names of their inventions fail to hold the same cultural weight as in their inauguration. When the world threw itself through the small opening of a darkened chamber, the “viewer had to enter the camera obscura in order to see [the image]…the two were…co-present” (Silverman, 14). Today, photographs are called posts, memes, .jpgs, .gifs among other titles. In similar ways to the daguerreotype and the calotype, the names of photographs determines their economic and aesthetic purposes. This has become a rather complex structure of overlapping uses of an image in marketing, social media, personal archive, and self-expression. The co-present experience of self and image has escaped the darkened chamber. It has become increasingly difficult to differentiate between the countless worlds that throw themselves into the retina. It is Talbot’s appreciation of the photograph, and not Daguerre’s entrepreneurship, that offers a more honest impact of beauty through photography.

Images

Figure 1. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Still Life (Interior of a Cabinet of Curiosities). 1837. Société Française De Photographie, Paris.

Figure 2. William Henry Fox Talbot. Lattice Window Taken with the Camera Obscura. (1835). Photogenic drawing negative, mounted in blackened paper. National Media Museum. Bradford, England.

Works Cited

Marien, Mary Warner. Photography a Cultural History. 4th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2015. Print.

Silverman, Kaja. The Miracle of Analogy, Or, The History of Photography. 1st ed. Vol. 1. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2015. Print.

Tanzi, Ron. ART256 Course: History of Photography. Lectures 2, 3. Seattle Central College. Retrieved Spring 2017. <https://canvas.seattlecentral.edu/courses/1454209>.

Image Sources

Figure 1

Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé. Still Life (Interior of a Cabinet of Curiosities). Daguerreotype. 1837. Société Française De Photographie, Paris. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Daguerreotype. Web. 8 May 2017. <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Daguerreotype_Daguerre_Atelier_1837.jpg/1600px-Daguerreotype_Daguerre_Atelier_1837.jpg>

Figure 2

Talbot, William Henry Fox. Lattice Window Taken with the Camera Obscura. (1835). Photogenic drawing negative, mounted in blackened paper. National Media Museum. Bradford, England. Getty Images. In Focus: 175 Years Since Fox Talbot Invented Calotype. Web. 8 May 2017.

<http://www.gettyimages.com/event/years-since-fox-talbot-invented-calotype-photographic-process-571683263>