America’s Smithsonian Institution is now working with the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago to study daguerreotypes. Scientists say these early photos are in danger of being lost forever.
The young woman in one daguerreotype they’re working on was most likely a teenager or in her early 20s when the picture was made. Her image was captured on a copper plate with finely polished, shining silver in the middle of the 19th century.
“It was the first time you could go into a studio and have your photograph taken, and you could put it up somewhere and show it off.”
That’s Daniel Weinberg. He works at the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago. He has studied many daguerreotypes. He says they are popular with collectors and historians alike.
“They’re luminous, and they’re almost three dimensional, and you almost want to step into one.”
He also says daguerreotypes were one of a kind, not meant to be reproduced like current photographs. Louis Daguerre of France was the inventor of this first photographic process. The technology was very popular in the United States in the middle of the 1800s.
“It spread like wildfire in the United States. There were hundreds of thousands of daguerreotypes made over a 20-year span.”
Ed Vicenzi is a researcher with the Smithsonian Institution. Many of the most important daguerreotypes are now stored at the Smithsonian and in the collections of the United States Library of Congress.
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25