A daguerreotype by Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros—a work of extraordinary quality and rarity—has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum. Both a depiction and a demonstration of what the medium was capable of at its high point in 1850s Paris, The Salon of Baron Gros shows the interior of a mid-nineteenth-century parlor believed to be that of the baron, with light streaming in from a window at left.

Monumental Journey is the first exhibition to focus on Girault de Prangey's Mediterranean journey. Here are five things to know before your visit.

After three years traveling throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey returned to France with more than one thousand daguerreotype—unique photographic images on silvered copper plates.

This exhibition catalogue documents early photography, particularly the daguerreotype work of the Boston firm, Southworth & Hawes. A thorough introduction provides a brief history of photography, introduces the collection, and highlights the many innovations of these pioneering American artists. Accompanying a 1939 exhibition of daguerreotypes and photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art that commemorated the centenary of photography, this text highlights the historic and artistic importance of these early forays into a new medium.

In 1842, the pioneering French photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804–1892) set out eastward across the Mediterranean, daguerreotype equipment in tow. He spent the next three years documenting lands that were then largely unknown to the West, including Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, in some of the earliest surviving photographic images of these places. Monumental Journey, the first monograph in English on this brilliant yet enigmatic artist, explores the hundreds of daguerreotypes Girault made during his unprecedented trip, offering a rare, early look at sites and cities that have since been altered—sometimes irrevocably—by urban, environmental, and political change. Beautiful full-scale reproductions of Girault’s photographs, many published here for the first time, and incisive essays shed new light on the arc of his career and his groundbreaking contributions to the burgeoning fields of photography, archaeology, and architectural history. Monumental Journey presents an artist of astonishing innovation whose work occupies a singular space at the border of history and modernity, tradition and invention, endurance and evanescence.

While portraiture was by far the most common subject of daguerreotypes, artists and scientists, explorers and archaeologists all took up the camera and produced pictures unlike any that had been made before.

The daguerreotype process, employing a polished silver-plated sheet of copper, was the dominant form of photography for the first twenty years of picture making in the United States.

Some 175 of the best surviving examples of a medium that changed the history of art and visual representation forever will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 23, 2003, through January 4, 2004. The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839-1855 is the first survey of key monuments from photography's first moments, when its pioneers used the invention for artistic, scientific, ethnographic, documentary, and other purposes. The exhibition will employ state-of-the-art 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 magic."