Daguerre's first street photographs of Paris seemed eerily empty of people
When Samuel Morse saw early daguerreotypes of busy Paris boulevards, he was baffled: not a single person, horse or carriage appeared. Exposures took ten minutes or more, so anything moving simply vanished. The stage designer behind these silver pictures had stumbled onto the trick that made photography practical.
Louis Daguerre, born on 18 November 1787 at Cormeilles-en-Parisis, trained under Pierre Prevost, France's first panorama painter, and became a celebrated theatre designer. With the painter Charles Marie Bouton he created the diorama, which opened in Paris in 1822. Audiences faced a translucent canvas about 70 feet wide, painted on both sides; as shutters shifted the lighting from front to back, a scene would transform before their eyes.
In 1829 he teamed up with Nicephore Niepce, who had already fixed camera images using bitumen that hardened in light but needed exposures of hours or days. After Niepce died in 1833, Daguerre turned to silver. He coated a silvered copper plate with iodine vapour, and his crucial insight was that a brief exposure left an invisible latent image that mercury fumes could bring out. Salt water, and later hypo, fixed it. Seeing an early result, he boasted of having captured light itself.
The finished plate was a mirror-like, laterally reversed image so delicate that the lightest rub could spoil it, which is why daguerreotypes sit behind glass. France's Academy of Sciences announced the process on 7 January 1839, and on 19 August the government released it free to the world, paying lifetime pensions to Daguerre and to Niepce's son Isidore. Oddly, days earlier Daguerre's agent had filed a British patent, making Britain the one country where licences were required.
Better lenses soon cut exposures to seconds, and millions of portraits followed, each one unique and impossible to copy except by rephotographing it. Henry Fox Talbot's paper calotype of 1841 allowed endless prints, and cheaper glass and tin processes of the 1850s finished the job: by 1860 few photographers still used Daguerre's method. He died on 10 July 1851 at Bry-sur-Marne, and his name is among the 72 engraved on the Eiffel Tower.
Source: Louis Daguerre
