1426
many daguerreotypists were also practicing photography
on glass. By 1855–1860, every town of any signifi cance
and many a tourist spot or place of passage had at least
one resident photographer, and the itinerant “dag’typist”
with his wagon and chemicals had become a familiar
feature of the countryside.
The daguerreotype boom of the 1840s and early
1850s was sustained by a climate of “near-perfect
competition” (Reese V. Jenkins) that was facilitated
by the quasi-absence of commercial restrictions on the
practice. This situation changed with the advent of nega-
tive-positive processes, which made it possible for some
individuals, notably one James A. Cutting, to take out
patents on minor improvements with a view to control-
ling the entire market of glass-plate photography. The
“Cutting patent” or “bromide patent,” awarded in 1854
for the use of potassium bromide in combination with
collodion on glass, enabled its holder to exert durable
fi nancial pressure on many practitioners, until it was
repealed in 1868 upon an application to renew it. More
generally, the 1850s and 1860s witnessed a greater di-
versity of processes, as well as the emergence of cheaper
variants (such as the “ambrotype” and its more popular
version, the tintype, which as a pseudo-positive process
on a dark metal base continued the daguerreotype model
in the U.S. and remained hugely popular throughout the
19th century) and mass-market picture products (such as
the carte-de-visite and then stereophotographic views).
These cheaper, more common types of pictures gradu-
ally transformed an activity that had been largely a craft
into a more industrial and more aggressively commercial
business. Thus, this period was marked on the one hand
by the rise of larger suppliers or brokers and a few domi-
nant picture-making fi rms (the most important being the
Anthony brothers’ company in New York), and on the
other by a spirit of suspicion and bitter rivalry among
the more isolated individual photographers, leading to
countless efforts, between 1850 and 1870, to organize
the profession (see entry “Societies, groups, institutions,
and exhibitions in the United States”). The atmosphere
of defi ance and the absence of a strong organizational
framework was illustrated by the famous affair of the
“hillotype,” an alleged process for color daguerreotypes
which the Reverend Levi Hill claimed to have invented,
but which could never be either proved or disproved,
despite a protracted investigation and major turmoil in
the photographic profession in the 1850s.
Meanwhile, by 1860, it can be said that photography
had become part of American culture at large. Even
though the prices of full-plate daguerreotypes had
remained too high for most people to afford them, the
carte-de-visite, the tintype and the stereoview gradually
turned the experience of photography into a common
one, and allowed large segments of the population to
own at least a few pictures. These would of course be
portraits for the most part, and the more privileged
individuals and families who had started accumulating
daguerreotypes in the early 1840s were already, by 1860,
enjoying the later popular ritual of viewing the growth of
children, family resemblances and more generally fam-
ily history through the photo-album. This photographic
construction of family memories was already com-
mented on by Oliver W. Holmes in his famous articles
on stereoscopic photography, which appeared between
1859 and 1863 in the Atlantic Monthly, and which also
indicated the emergence of a cultural consumption of
images of the world in the upper, educated classes. For
indeed, besides portraits, an increasing share of pho-
tographic production in the 1850s illustrated aspects
of public life and national culture, from portraits of
statesmen and artists that were reproduced as engrav-
ings to views of prominent buildings, city scenes, and
some already well-established tourist sites (such as
Niagara Falls), which would be made popular mostly
by stereo-views. Many burgeoning American cities of
the antebellum period were illustrated by photography,
sometimes in a very self-conscious way, as in the case
of Cincinnati (a stunning multi-plate daguerreotype
panorama of which, by Charles Fontayne and William
Porter, had won a prize at the Franklin Institute in 1849)
or especially San Francisco, which almost from its very
inception as a city cultivated a kind of photographic nar-
cissism (with views by George Fardon, Charles L. Weed,
and then Carleton E. Watkins and others) that would only
expand in the 1860s and 1870s; in later years, the rise
of Chicago as a metropolis was similarly documented
almost day to day by photography. The 1850s and early
1860s also saw the fi rst signifi cant examples of land-
scape and survey photography, in California especially,
but also in the Philadelphia area, although this trend
really picked up force only after 1868 or so. Although
still timidly, some Federal and state institutions, such
as the Department of Treasury for instance, started to
use photographers, as did also some large-scale expedi-
tions such as Colonel John C. Fremont’s fi fth expedition
across the Rocky Mountains in 1853 (daguerreotypist
Solomon N. Carvalho) and Commodore Mathew Perry’s
inaugural voyage to Japan in 1852–53 (daguerreotypist
Eliphalet Brown). The idea that photographs carried a
memorial and documentary value, and therefore could
produce a new kind of archive, was making its way into
many corners of society. Although American scientifi c
institutions were typically slow and reserved in this
process, the 1850s and 1860s saw some attempts at
building up collections of ethnographic photographs,
in a few cases of African-American slaves and, through
the practice of some Washington, D.C., photographers
(such as Zeno Shindler), of Indian representatives on
delegation visits. Thus, the earliest signifi cant bodies of
images of minority groups in the U.S. came into being