1425
Frederick A. P. Barnard; in addition, the development
of the daguerreotype in smaller cities, such as in the
South, was often led by local academics or physicians.
It is clear, however, that these beginnings were less
academic and more professional than in Europe, and
that they took place mostly outside established institu-
tions, or rather that those academic institutions that did
play a role (such as the American Institute, the Franklin
Institute, or even the American Philosophical Society)
were at the time too insignifi cant or too weak to exercise
any kind of control or even any major infl uence over the
course of events. Thus, what is striking about Morse’s
letter of March 1839 is not just its fantastic style, but
rather the fact that this private letter, full of emotional
marvelling, and necessarily devoid of any proof or il-
lustration, was reproduced in hundreds of newspapers
and served as the nearest equivalent of an offi cial an-
noucement of the daguerreotype in the U.S. In contrast
to the ceremonious and centralist rituals that surrounded
the invention in France, the spontaneous and diverse
beginnings of photography in the U.S. were auspicious
for an invention that was to become a “mirror image,”
in Richard Rudisill’s phrase, of political and cultural
democracy—so much so that by the 1850s many an
American journalist would claim that “photography
was born in the U.S.”
The fact that Daguerre did not take out a patent in
the U.S. was a major factor in the daguerreotype’s long
domination; its development, however, took almost
immediately a decisively technical and professional
turn. Virtually every effort of the pioneers centered on
the drive to make portraits and to make a business out
of them, and this soon led to the registration of many
patents for technical improvements. Whatever the an-
swer may be to the much-debated question of the “fi rst
photographic portrait,” and while European experiment-
ers were also involved in 1839–40 in research aimed at
reducing exposure time and increasing light input and
chemical sensitivity, such research mobilized more en-
ergy and ingenuity, and yielded quicker positive results,
in the U.S. than anywhere else. A classic example of
this American specialization is the short career of the
Wolcott-Johnson partnership, which in October 1839
created and soon patented, for the purpose of making
portraits, a simple design of a camera without a lens,
and used its superior luminosity to open in New York,
in May 1840, the world’s fi rst studio for photographic
portraiture. While Wolcott also designed many recipes
for “accelerating” silver salts and more generally reduc-
ing exposures, many more examples could be adduced of
early and continuing American experiments that almost
always touched upon the technique of making portraits,
including its more artistic aspects such as lighting,
background, and the expression of the sitter. Between
1839 and 1845 at least, portrait-making was virtually
the sole photographic activity practiced in the U.S., and
after that it remained both the most important and the
most prestigious branch of daguerreotypy, as illustrated
by many an enterprising “daguerreotype institute” (such
as the network of studios owned by the Bostonian John
Plumbe), and, most famously, by Mathew Brady’s
Broadway studio. Brady’s “Gallery of Illustrious Ameri-
cans,” which became something of a household word
in the 1850s, especially exemplifi ed the link between
photography and the building of a national identity, as
well as the connection that the portrait always suggested
between one’s image and the public image of celebrities
functioning as models. Well beyond the daguerreotype
era, indeed for the entire 19th century, portrait-making
would remain the dominant use of photography, feeding
a profession which, as early as the 1840s, emerged as
unrivalled in size, dynamism, and business.
The unique success and durability of the daguerreo-
type process in the U.S. can be measured by the fact
that both in quantitative and qualitative terms it reached
its climax after 1850, rather than before, and that it re-
mained dominant until 1855 and widely practiced until
the early 1860s, thereby departing radically from the
general course of development observed in Europe. Thus
in 1851 at the London Crystal Palace Exhibition, Ameri-
cans showed nothing but daguerreotypes and indeed
won several prizes for them: a fi rst prize to Martin M.
Lawrence for stylish and allegorical portraits, a second
prize to Mathew Brady for his portraits of celebrities,
and another second prize to John A. Whipple for his da-
guerreotypes of the moon. At the 1853 New York Crystal
Palace Exhibition, daguerreotypes were still largely
dominant, although for the fi rst time the top award went
to paper photographs. The years 1850–1853 were the
peak of a kind of Daguerrian cult in the U.S., with the
publication of the world’s fi rst specialized journal under
the title The Daguerreian Journal (founded in November
1850 by Samuel D. Humphrey); the creation of the fi rst
two professional associations, namely, the New York
State Daguerrean Association and the American Da-
guerre Association; and, in the same year, 1851, which
saw the death of Daguerre and an emotional homage
from the American profession to the “French master,”
the building of a huge photographic manufacturing
complex on the Hudson under the name Daguerreville.
According to sources quoted by Taft and other histori-
ans, in 1853 the number of daguerrian establishments
in New York exceeded one hundred, which is twice as
many as the fi gure known for Paris in 1848, and the
annual production of daguerreotypes in the U.S. was
estimated at three million; between 1850 and 1860, the
national census recorded an increase from 938 to 2650
daguerreotypists, while the 1860 census also registered
a new category of “photographists” with a population
of 504, probably an underestimation since by this date