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The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839–1855
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More about This Exhibition
Some 175 of the best surviving examples of a medium that changed the history of art and visual representation forever were on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 23, 2003 through January 4, 2004. "The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839–1855" was the first survey of key monuments from photography's earliest moments, when its pioneers used the invention for a broad spectrum of artistic, scientific, and documentary purposes. The exhibition employed specially designed display and lighting techniques to reveal the incomparable detail and sculptural quality that distinguishes this process and which led one of its earliest champions, Jules Janin, to describe the daguerreotype as "divine perfection."
Philippe de Montebello, director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, commented: "The invention of the daguerreotype—the earliest photographic process—forever altered the way we see and understand our world. No invention since Gutenberg's movable type had so changed the transmission of knowledge and culture, and none would have so great an impact again until the informational revolution of the late twentieth century."
The exhibition was made possible in part by the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund.
The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
More about the Works on View
Painters and the Daguerreotype
Daguerreotype Portraits
Scientists and the Daguerreotype
Images of Distant Lands
Exhibition Organizers and Credits
Scholarly Catalogue on CD-ROM
Educational Programs
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More about the Works on View
Among the highlights of the exhibition were ten daguerreotypes by the medium's inventor, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (French, 1787–1851), most never before shown in the United States, as well as rare examples of his painting and graphic art. Before achieving fame as a pioneer of photography, Daguerre was best known as a Romantic painter and printmaker, theatrical designer, and proprietor of the Diorama, a popular Parisian spectacle of illusionistic effects. From the mid-1820s he had searched for a way to make pictures using light and chemistry, and in 1829 he formed a partnership with Nicéphore Niépce, who had been working on the same problem and who had already achieved primitive but real results. Niépce's famous 1826 heliogravure reproduction of Isaac Briot's Cardinal d'Amboise—an icon of photographic prehistory—was included in the exhibition, along with Niépce's heliogravure plate and Briot's original engraving (Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône). Not until after Niépce's death in 1833, however, did Daguerre perfect the process that he would, perhaps immodestly, dub the "daguerreotype." (View a computer animation of the daguerreotype process.)
Examples of the new art—astonishingly precise, one-of-a-kind images on silver-plated sheets of copper—were presented before the French Academy of Sciences on January 7, 1839. These were the first photographs seen in public. Realizing that a patent would be difficult to enforce, Daguerre guarded his secrets. Seven months later, after securing a lifetime pension from the French government in exchange for placing the rights to his process in the public domain, Daguerre finally revealed the steps in creating these seemingly magical images. So rapid and great was the success of the new medium that within months, Théodore Maurisset lampooned a world gone mad in a caricature entitled "Daguerreotypomania" (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris).
Over the next two decades, before they were replaced entirely by paper photography, millions of daguerreotypes were made by great artists, itinerant artisans, gentlemen amateurs, explorers, astronomers, and archivists on both sides of the Atlantic. Most have disappeared in the course of time, but the works that were on view in "The Dawn of Photography" included superb examples that have survived the intervening century and a half.
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Painters and the Daguerreotype
Painters, of course, were among the first to understand that Daguerre's invention would change the course of art. Some resisted the new medium, others exploited it as an aid to painting, and still others embraced it as a new means of expression. Self-consciously artistic works were amply represented in the exhibition, including a lyrical landscape near Troyes (George Eastman House, Rochester) by the painter Alexandre Clausel; an exquisite study of two standing nudes (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) by Jacques-Antoine Moulin (some of whose "photographic studies for artists" were deemed obscene by the authorities and earned him a month in jail and a 100-franc fine); and numerous posed tableaux vivants by the gentleman-amateur photographer Louis-Adolphe Humbert de Molard, including Louis Dodier as a Prisoner (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) in which the foreman of his estate sits on a straw-covered floor, his hands bound in chains and his eyes fixed in a sultry stare.
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Daguerreotype Portraits
The most frequent subject of daguerreotypes was the portrait, which fulfilled a deep-seated desire to leave one's visage to loved ones and to posterity. Among the famous artists and writers portrayed in the exhibition were Daguerre himself, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-François Millet, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas. There were also many striking portraits of people whose identities are lost to history but whose characters remain palpable on the daguerreotype plate.
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Scientists and the Daguerreotype
Scientists immediately recognized the potential of this new medium. They harnessed the camera to telescopes and microscopes, seeking to exploit the daguerreotype's capacity for recording with unparalleled exactitude whatever came before the lens. Daguerreotypes by Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault showing the solar spectrum and blood cells of a frog were among the scientific images in the exhibition. Daguerreotypes of skulls and skeletons, casts, and living men and women of various races—made in the 1840s for the museum of natural history in Paris, and still preserved there in the archives of the Musée de l'Homme—were also included.
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Images of Distant Lands
Equally astonishing to ninteenth-century viewers and fascinating to modern audiences are the images of distant lands that daguerreotypists brought back to Paris. Hippolyte Gaucheraud, writing on the day before Daguerre's photographs were to be revealed to the Académie, wrote presciently, "Travelers, you will soon be able, perhaps, at the cost of some hundreds of francs, to acquire the apparatus invented by M. Daguerre, and you will be able to bring back to France the most beautiful monuments, the most beautiful scenes of the whole world. You will see how far from the truth of the Daguerreotype are your pencils and brushes." Daguerreotypes made by Alphonse-Eugène-Jules Itier in Macao, by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey in Athens, Cairo, and Lebanon, and by Jean-Pierre Alibert in Siberia are among the earliest surviving photographs of these locations. Four extraordinarily beautiful daguerreotypes made on the Acropolis in Athens by Baron Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gros in 1850 were among the highlights of the exhibition: the façade of the Propylaea (Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal), a bas-relief from the Parthenon (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), a Nike tying her sandal (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris), and the Erechtheion (Therond Collection, Paris).
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Exhibition Organizers and Credits
"The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839–1855" was organized at the Metropolitan by Malcolm Daniel, acting curator-in-charge of the Museum's Department of Photographs, with the assistance of Stephen Pinson, Aaron and Betty Lee Stern Research Fellow in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan in 2002–2003. The exhibition was designed by Michael Batista, exhibition designer, with graphic design by Sophia Geronimus, senior graphic designer, both of the Museum's Design Department. The lighting was designed by Clint Coller, Richard Lichte, and Zack Zanolli. The specialized presentation of many objects and installation of the exhibition was by Predrag Dimitrijevic, senior departmental technician in the Department of Photographs. The exhibition's conservation team was led by Nora Kennedy, Sherman Fairchild Conservator of Photographs.
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Scholarly Catalogue on CD-ROM
A fully illustrated, scholarly catalogue on CD-ROM, published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is available in the Museum's bookshops and online in the Met Store. In addition to reproductions and catalogue entries of all works in the exhibition, the CD-ROM includes essays by Quentin Bajac and Dominique Planchon-de Font-Réaulx, both of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and co-curators of the exhibition; Christine Barthe of the Musée de l'Homme, Paris; André Gunthert of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris; Sylvain Morand of the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg; Stephen Pinson; Françoise Reynaud of the Musée Carnavalet, Paris; and Paul-Louis Roubert of the Société Française de Photographie, Paris. The CD-ROM also includes a video introduction by Mr. Daniel; a computer animation of the daguerreotype process; an anthology of early texts; a chronology; and a comprehensive bibliography. (View the video introduction from the CD-ROM.)
The CD-ROM was made possible in part by the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation Inc.
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Educational Programs
The Metropolitan Museum organized a variety of educational programs in conjunction with the exhibition including lectures by Mr. Pinson, Ms. Planchon-de Font-Réaulx, and Mr. Bajac and a screening of the 1964 film Daguerre: The Birth of Photography (directed by Roger Leenhardt). Educational programs were made possible by The Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust.
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