The barber had one. So did the shopkeeper, the taxidermist and the wheelwright. In 1840s America, portraiture was no longer the prerogative of the elite, laboriously painted in oil on canvas. With the ...

The Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri says they have acquired what is thought to be the earliest known photograph depicting slaves. Importantly, the image also challenges some popular ...

In 1839, Samuel Morse was in Paris to obtain a patent for the electro-magnetic telegraph he had developed in America, when he caught wind of another scientific wonder of the age: the daguerreotype.

Sally Guest is an experienced researcher of daguerreotypes with a personal collection she says numbers some 448 pictures — most in little wooden boxes or leather cases — charming, sometimes haunting ...

The contemporary daguerreotype series was funded by the Australian Research Council project ‘Capturing Foundational Australian Photography in a Globalising World’ DE200101322, and supported by the ...

The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., has acquired an image of Dolley Madison, believed to be the first photograph of a U.S. first lady. The circa 1846 daguerreotype was purchased for ...

Two Exhibitions of Early American Photography on View in July Gabrielle Obusek Peter Cooper and Family, unidentified daguerreotypist, three-quarter-plate daguerreotype with applied color, c. 1850.

Among the colorful characters immortalized in the colorless daguerreotype medium are (clockwise from upper left): writer Henry Thoreau, Seneca leader Blacksnake, Navy Commodore Matthew Perry, mental ...

“When you look at a 19th century portrait, there is a palpable sense of the person actually being there in the image,” photographer Jerry Spagnoli tells TIME. “It’s still an image. It’s in your hand.

There are lots of portrait photos in the Getty Museum’s exhibition “In Focus: Daguerreotypes,” but not many smiles. The photographers would not have been urging their subjects to say “cheese.” ...

Before digital, before film, before tintypes and the collodion process, before the word “photography” was even official, French inventor Louis Daguerre gave us the daguerreotype. It was the first ...

The Smithsonian National Portrait gallery acquired a recently discovered daguerreotype of first lady Dolley Madison, paying multiples of a presale estimate to bring the historic portrait into its ...