Louis Daguerre

French inventor and photographer

• Born: November 18, 1787
• Birthplace: Cormeilles, near Paris, France
• Died: July 10, 1851
• Place of death: Bry-sur-Marne, near Paris, France

Daguerre’s renown rests largely on his contributions to the technology of photography. He achieved the earliest fixed-image photographs developed from latent images, and the process he discovered produced photographic plates that were named daguerreotypes after him.

Early Life

The formal education of Jacques Daguerre (dah-gahr) in the schools of Orléans was brief and poor because of the distractions of the French Revolution. Fortunately, he revealed a gift for drawing early in his childhood, which, in some measure, offset the quality of his education. Daguerre was apprenticed by his father to a draftsman. Though the training in detailed exactitude was later to prove beneficial, it was Daguerre’s wish to study painting. In 1804, his father allowed him to go to Paris for that purpose. He was apprenticed to the chief stage designer at the Paris Opera, with whom he lived and worked for three years.

At the end of this apprenticeship, Daguerre took employment with Pierre Prévost, a painter who had achieved a certain celebrity with his panoramas. These were representations akin to those currently called cycloramas. The viewer was situated at the center of a cylindrical painting of very large dimensions, comprising a single expansive view. Such paintings must be executed with scrupulous attention to accuracy of scale and fidelity to perspective. Once more, his experience in draftsmanship served him well. In 1810, one week before his twenty-third birthday, Daguerre married twenty-year-old Louise Georgina Smith, sister of a fellow employee at the Prévost studio. He continued his association with Prévost for six years after his marriage, starting an independent career only in 1816.

Daguerre quickly distinguished himself as a set designer, where an ability to achieve delightful illusions and exotic effects came fully into play. Until 1821, he was engaged in designing sets for some of the best-known theaters in Paris, and in 1819 the Académie Royale de Musique enlisted his widely acclaimed talents. For two years, he was one of the chief designers for the Académie.

Life’s Work

During 1821 and 1822, Daguerre devoted much time and effort to the development of a new technique for creating scenes of very convincing realism that he called the “diorama.” This new form of illusion was developed by Daguerre in conjunction with another former associate from Prévost’s studio, Charles-Marie Bouton.

The diorama was clearly the product of a series of incremental advances on previous techniques for creating visual illusion. The most recent, the diaphanorama, was itself a departure from the panorama. Franz Niklaus König, the creator of the diaphanorama, was Swiss by birth and was also an experienced set designer.

König’s effects were produced by painting with watercolors on transparent papers, the backs of which he subsequently oiled to increase their translucence. Displayed at a distance in darkened rooms, the paintings were illuminated by controlled, reflected light played on the back as well as the front, the relative intensity of the light being adjustable in minute transitions. It is a virtual certainty that Daguerre witnessed a display of König’s ingenuity when the latter traveled to Paris in 1821 and that his own diorama was actually a refinement of the basic concept devised by König.

Daguerre and Bouton bought land and constructed a specially designed structure. An enormous building was necessary because of the very large paintings involved and the distance to be maintained between the paintings and the viewers. The “picture rooms”—there were two—lay at the end of corridors that were arranged like spokes radiating from the circular viewing salon, widening as they moved away from the audience. Viewers sat or stood in a darkened, circular, revolvable salon that was positioned in such a way that they could look down only one of the two corridors, at the end of which was the scene.

After all the effects of the first scene had been rehearsed, the gallery faded into darkness, and the salon was imperceptibly made to revolve to the position from which the second gallery could be brought into view by the gradual introduction of light upon the second scene. Illumination was achieved by light introduced through windows, controlled by shutterlike devices, sometimes colored by filters and conducted to the desired surfaces by reflection. The structure itself and the ingenious system of illumination were so central to the scheme that they were independently patented.

The paintings, which were periodically changed so that audiences could return to see a new set of scenes, were executed upon both sides of a white calico fabric, optimally translucent and prepared with sizing. The pigment was suspended in a turpentine vehicle and applied to the fabric in as thin a coat as would achieve the effect without causing complete opacity. The painting was then shaded with translucent colors. By illuminating the painting first on one side and then the other and by using lights of various colors, parts of the composition were made to disappear, while others seemed to advance. It was possible in this manner to present a before-and-after history of a scene, for example, a peaceful Swiss valley that fell victim to an enormous landslide. By using several painted cloths in echelon with the lighting such that the viewer could see through one, two, or more of them simultaneously, it was possible to achieve an astonishing degree of three-dimensional realism as well as to give the illusion of transitory atmospheric effects.

The diorama was received with enthusiasm, and Daguerre was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1824; however, the enterprise appears never to have been much of a financial success. In March of 1839, a fire destroyed the Paris Diorama, which, because of the highly combustible materials it contained, was a constant danger.

By that time, Daguerre had brought to fruition his work on a means of fixing an image made upon a light-sensitive surface in a camera obscura. A man of his time, Daguerre was motivated not only by an interest in the accurate study of proportion and perspective but also by a desire for celebrity and wealth. Possibly this drive to distinguish himself explains why he periodically made claims to successes that proved to be false or that were only subsequently achieved.

Sometime during the year 1826, Daguerre learned of the work being done on heliography by Nicéphore Niépce . Niépce, in 1826, had produced the world’s first photograph. Using a pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea (asphaltum) and placed at the back of a camera obscura, he achieved an image of a scene from the second story of his country home. The process, however, required an exposure time of eight hours. Upon learning of this shortcoming in the exposure process, Daguerre at once approached Niépce by letter. By misrepresenting the extent of his own success, Daguerre drew a reluctant Niépce into a partnership. Having failed to secure any return on his own developments, Niépce on December 14, 1829, signed an agreement with Daguerre, who said that he had a strategy by which Niépce could profit from his discoveries.

The partnership was entitled “Niépce-Daguerre,” and by its terms Daguerre was obliged to “improve” a process of which Niépce was named “inventor.” Daguerre was also to contribute a camera of an improved design, which he claimed to have developed and that would substantially reduce the exposure time. The camera, in the form described by Daguerre, did not exist. Daguerre, however, was twenty-two years younger than the senior partner, and Niépce hoped to enjoy the fruits of the great capacity for hard work and the unflagging optimism that characterized his new partner.

Daguerre learned from Niépce that it was not necessary to expose a plate until the image became visible on its surface; a faint or even completely invisible image could be brought out (developed) by chemical processes. Daguerre also seems to have learned from his partner that iodine could be used as the photosensitive coating to receive the image.

Niépce died in great poverty in 1833, before the partnership yielded any advantage to him. His son and legatee, Isidore, succeeded him as Daguerre’s partner. At that time, the original problems remained unsolved: Images using iodine were negative, the exposure time remained seven to eight hours, and no means had been found to prevent the image from deterioration in light.

Daguerre, however, began to make critical discoveries after the death of Niépce. First, he made the discovery (evidently by the purest chance) that iodized silvered plates could be used as the surface upon which to secure light images in the camera. Then, sometime in 1837, he found (also quite by chance) that mercury vapors would precipitate out on the light-affected portions of an iodized silver surface. These two critical discoveries are credited entirely to Daguerre in spite of his haphazard methods. The great advantage in them was the production of a positive image at a substantial reduction in the exposure time, though he had not as yet discovered any means of making the image thus obtained permanent.

On May 9, 1835, Daguerre secured a modification of the partnership agreement. Isidore reluctantly signed, and Daguerre soon announced publicly that he had discovered a means of fixing permanently the images that he was securing. In fact, it was not until two years later, in May of 1837, that he made such a discovery.

Over the strong objections of Isidore, terms of the partnership were again revised. The names in the partnership were reversed, and it was made clear that Daguerre had pressed beyond mere improvement of someone else’s discovery. Isidore was told that the new process (mercury development) reduced exposure time to four minutes. In truth, it still required twenty to thirty minutes of exposure to secure an image, which was still too long to make portraiture a practical possibility.

An effort to finance further development of the process through a public subscription failed in 1839. In March, the diorama was consumed in a spectacular fire. Daguerre was fifty-one, and his fortunes seemed to have hit a low point. He and Niépce decided to realize what they could by offering the process to the French government. They revealed the method to François Arago, a member of the Chamber of Deputies as well as president of the Academy of Sciences. Arago then secured the government’s acceptance. Daguerre was made an Officer of the Legion of Honor, and both he and Niépce were given comfortable life pensions. The French government at once donated the process to the world at large.

Within months, a flood of developments vastly improved the quality and practicality of daguerreotypy. Among the more important of these were the use of thiosulfate as a fixative; a lens that corrected Daguerre’s original mirror image; the introduction of the tripod and leather bellows, which made the camera more easily portable; and the discovery of bromoiodide and iodine bromochloride to increase significantly the sensitivity of plates, which, coupled with improved cameras, reduced exposure time to between 90 and 120 seconds for good-quality results.

Daguerre, much lionized for his discoveries, retired to a country estate at Bry-sur-Marne, where he died quite suddenly on July 10, 1851, at the age of sixty-three. The surviving daguerreotypes taken of their eponymous creator reveal a gentleman of ample but not excessive girth, a very round face still crowned by a full complement of curly, salt-and-pepper hair, a full mustache, and a look of fixed determination about the hooded eyes.

Significance

During an age when an individual’s worth was considered to be the precise equivalent of his wealth and the self-made man was the social ideal, Jacques Daguerre, by hard work and seriousness of purpose, built upon native talents rather than education or social privilege to become both wealthy and famous. In the creation of the diorama, he produced not merely the most exciting optical illusion prior to motion pictures but also techniques that are still used in stage settings for the ballet and the opera to achieve mysterious or transitional effects.

Daguerre turned his attention to the emerging technology of photography when the diorama provided recognition but no appreciable wealth. Though the extent of his indebtedness to Niépce remains unresolved, it is certain that it was his own efforts that resulted in the first fixed-image photograph developed from a latent image. It is, therefore, equally certain that the foundation for the art in its present state was laid by Daguerre.

Bibliography

Barger, Susan, and William B. White. The Daguerreotype: Nineteenth-Century Technology and Modern Science. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Reprint. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Describes the daguerreotype process and explains how nineteenth century photographers and scientists understood and used the new technology.

Bisbee, A. The History and Practice of DaguerreoTyping. Dayton, Ohio: L. F. Clafting, 1853. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1973. An early and very clear description of the process used by Daguerre. This little book was written for the American public at the crest of the enthusiasm over the technology.

Buerger, Janet E. French Daguerreotypes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. A catalog for the daguerreotype collection at the International Museum of Photography. Includes information on Daguerre’s background, intentions, and competition, and describes the contemporary intellectuals who understood and developed the new photographic medium.

Cork, Richard. “The End of Art.” New Statesman 130, no. 4546 (July 16, 2001): 44. Chronicles the rise of photography, including a description of Daguerre’s invention. Discusses British society’s response to the daguerreotype.

Eder, Josef Maria. History of Photography. Translated by Edward Epstean. New York: Columbia University Press, 1945. This book is annoyingly chauvinistic but sound in its scholarship. It is technically more informed than the Gernsheim work (see below). Eder always thought that the critical discoveries were those of Niépce and evidently thought Daguerre not above taking credit for discoveries not, in fact, his own.

Gernsheim, Helmut, and Alison Gernsheim. L. J. M. Daguerre (1787-1851): The World’s First Photographer. Cleveland: World, 1956. Rev. ed. L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype. New York: Dover, 1968. The only biography devoted to Daguerre’s life and work. This study includes plates of the earliest efforts at photography and the two best daguerreotypes of Daguerre.

Rinhart, Floyd, and Marion Rinhart. The American Daguerreotype. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981. This book, which includes a number of photographs of original daguerreotype equipment and some beautiful examples of the art, includes a brief account of its development.

Werge, John. The Evolution of Photography. London: Piper & Carter and J. Werge, 1890. Werge emphasizes the haphazard nature of Daguerre’s research and recounts in detail stories that emphasize the utter happenstance by which the critical discoveries were made.