Louis Daguerre

Daguerre began as a theatrical designer who ran a large diorama theater in Paris. The diorama shifted painted scenes from daylight to night by changing transmitted and reflected light, and it sharpened his obsession with fixing light and image in permanent form^*1. Around 1826 he began working with Nicéphore Niépce; after Niépce’s death in 1833, Daguerre kept refining a process that developed an image on a silvered plate with mercury vapor. On January 7, 1839, the daguerreotype was announced at the French Academy of Sciences, and on August 19 the French state released the process as a “gift to the world” outside Britain^*2. The method spread rapidly, but each daguerreotype remained a unique, non-reproducible object. His famous view of the Boulevard du Temple (c.1838) became known for capturing what is often described as the first human figure recorded in a photograph: a man standing still long enough to have his boots polished while traffic disappeared in the long exposure^*1. A studio fire on March 8, 1839 destroyed most of Daguerre’s surviving records, and fewer than twenty-five works are confirmed today^*2.