The Scenic Daguerreotype in America 1840–1860

Invented in France by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in the 1830s, the daguerreotype rapidly became the first widely practiced photographic process worldwide. By 1853, photographers in the United States produced an estimated three million a year, mostly portraits. But between 1840 and 1860, an innovative language of scenic outdoor daguerreotypes developed despite the technical challenges of the process. Surviving examples of these jewel-like scenic daguerreotypes number in the few thousands. This exhibition looks at eighty three, most selected from an important private collection. Included are two of the earliest American landscape photographs, extraordinary full-plate daguerreotypes made in 1840-41 by Samuel Bemis (1789–1881) and never before exhibited in public, and a street scene in Cincinnati made around 1851 by James Presley Ball (1825–1904). Gain an incredible view into mid-nineteenth-century American life and the beginnings of American landscape photography that emerged concurrently with the Hudson River School of painters. These forgotten but pioneering daguerreotypes laid the foundation for the scenic and urban landscape tradition that would dominate American photography in the twentieth century.