367
DAGUERREOTYPE
communicate and establish that good fellowship which
should exist between all exercising a common calling...
...The only hope in raising our calling is in publication
and communication; the opportunity is within our grasp;
and I trust when the current volume terminates its career,
and that we have all been weighed in the balance, we
shall not be found wanting.”
Before the end of the fi rst volume of publication,
Levi Hill had made the fi rst announcement of his
achievement at producing daguerreotypes in what he
stated were natural colours. So impressed was Hum-
phrey by Hill’s claims that he invited him to become
co-editor of the Daguerreian Journal, an offer which
he quickly regretted. Hill’s reluctance to detail his pro-
cess brought widespread opprobrium from within the
photographic community, despite his assertions that he
was withholding publication until he had the process in
a more perfect state. The daguerreian community, and
Samuel Humphrey, quickly lost faith in Hill’s claims.
He was accused of trying to swindle the purchasers of
his manuals, and his co-editorship of The Daguerre-
ian Journal was terminated before the completion of
volume two.
The journal attracted readers and contributors from
Europe as well as America, including such luminaries as
the leading British writer on photography, Robert Hunt,
whose writings on ‘Researches on Light,’ ‘Helichrome’
and ‘On the Application of Science to the Fine and Use-
ful Arts’ were all included in 1851, as was a review of
his book ‘Photography—a Treatise.’
After two years of successful publication, and
three volumes, the The Daguerrean Journal name was
changed to Humphrey’s Journal of the Daguerreotype
and Photographic Arts—usually thereafter referred to
as Humphrey’s Journal—a title it retained until the end
of volume 13. With the exception of a brief cessation
between January and march 1852, publication under
this name continued until late 1863.
For volume 14 only, a further name change was in-
troduced—to Humphrey’s Journal of Photography and
the Heliographic Arts and Sciences.
Renamed again in 1864 as Humphrey’s Journal of
Photography and the Allied Arts & Sciences, the maga-
zine continued to enjoy success until 1870 (the end of
volume 21) under the editorship of John Towler.
John Hannavy
See also: Humphrey, Samuel Dwight; Gurney,
Jeremiah; and Towler, John.
Further Reading
Eder, Josef Maria, History of Photography, New York: Dover,
1978.
Foresta, Merry A, and Wood, John, Secrets of the Dark Chamber,
Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1995.
Johnson, William S, Nineteenth Century Photography: An An-
notated Bibliography 1839–1879, London: Mansell, 1990.
Taft, Robert, Photography and the American Scene New York:
Dover, 1964.DAGUERREOTYPE
The daguerreotype process—the fi rst practical means
of capturing a lasting image by a photochemical reac-
tion—was developed in France in the 1820s and ’30s by
Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce and by Louis Jacques Mandé
Daguerre, after whom it is named. In this process, a
copper plate that has been coated with silver, polished,
and sensitized is exposed to light and then chemically
treated to produce and fi x a single positive photographic
image. The fi nely detailed picture that results from the
process alternately appears to its viewer as a positive
or a negative, depending on the angle of light in which
the cased mirror-like plate is held. The fi rst daguerre-
ian cameras reversed the image from right to left from
the original perspective; by 1840, the introduction of
mirrors in place of, or in addition to, lenses allowed
for right-reading images. Initially, the long exposure
time required to produce a daguerreotype inhibited its
use for portraiture, but by the early 1840s, important
chemical additions to the process and improvements
in camera- and lens-making allowed daguerreotypy to
be used for imaging human subjects. Its accuracy, rela-
tive rapidity, and affordability made daguerreotypy the
dominant form of photography until the 1850s, when
it was supplanted by negative-to-positive processes
that produced and reproduced images more easily and
inexpensively.Daguerre’s Process
Daguerre’s original process involved several compli-
cated steps that exceeded the capacities of most curious
amateurs. First, a sheet of copper was carefully coated
with a thin layer of silver, then cleaned and polished. The
characteristic refl ectivity of the daguerreian plate’s mir-
ror-like surface was achieved using an abrasive mixture
of pumice and oil that was washed from the plate with
nitric acid and water.
In a darkened room, the polished plate next was sen-
sitized through exposure to iodine fl akes in a specially
designed box until a chemical reaction introduced a thin
layer of silver iodide on the silvered surface, turning it
a bright golden color. Once placed in a plate holder and
covered with an opaque protective slide, the plate was
ready for exposure in a camera. These early cameras
were relatively simple: they consisted of a lightproof
wooden box within another box that had been fi tted with
a ground glass, a mirror, and a brass tube containing a