Saturday, January 9, 2021

Watch the Oiseau! - January 9, 2009

 

Photography was effectively born on January 9, 1839, when the first practical photographs were announced by the French Academy of Sciences. All the buzz was over a collection of metal plates containing black and white photographic images, with detail unlike anything society members had ever seen before. The inventor who had brought the plates to the Academy was not a scientist, but rather a painter and stage designer by the name of Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre. And his invention, which he not-so-humbly named after himself, was the "daguerreotype."

In spite of his breakthrough, Daguerre was unable to figure out a way to cash in on his invention, so when the French government offered to give a generous pension to both him and the estate of his late partner Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce (in exchange for the patent on the daguerreotype process), he -- naturally -- took them up on the offer.

The French government immediately released the patented process to the public as a gift. Daguerreotyping instantly became a sensation, with Daguerre's instruction manuals flying off the shelves and sellers having difficulty keeping them in stock. Thus was launched a French photographic revolution, you might say; a revolution that spawned portrait photography, travel photography, and (surprisingly soon after daguerreotyping was released into the public domain -- or perhaps not so surprisingly), erotic photography (Ooh la la!).

The popularity of the daguerreotype was short-lived, though. Within a decade, the development of other photographic processes gradually diminished the market share of the daguerreotype. Eventually, the drawbacks of the daguerreotype -- the inability to produce multiple prints and the preference for paper prints over metal plates -- hindered its sustained growth, and cheaper alternatives won out over the clarity of the daguerreotype images. With that, the first practical photographic process retreated into history and into the obscure niche of hobbyists.

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