The Daguerreotype: Contemporary work by Jonathan Danforth

From 7/27/2008 - 8/1/2008 daguerreotype master (pater familias, perhaps) Jerry Spagnoli will be teaching the Becquerel method of daguerreotypie at a workshop at The Photographer’s Formulary.

I attended a similar workshop in North Carolina a few years ago and it really whet my appetite. Being a learns-by-doing kind of guy, I found the small class size and topical focus to be enormously helpful in creating daguerreotypes on my own.

I can’t say that everything I know about daguerreotypes is because of Jerry but I will tell you that it sure is a healthy percentage. Don’t miss the opportunity to study with a real master of the art.

The Photographer’s Formulary is a wonderful stop online and I can only imagine that they provide an equally fun shopping experience in person. Bring some pocket money!

I recently updated this site to a new version of Wordpress, the content management system that I use.  Everything seems to be working fine but please drop me a line if you see any problems.  I also tweaked the code so that the header displays properly in Internet Explorer.

Happy daguerreotyping!

Andy Richmond over on the Wet Plate Collodion forum has posted an in-depth tutorial on the creation of replicated engraved mats and package preservers and followed it up with some great examples here. This is something that I’ve been meaning to get into for some time and I’m glad that Andy has saved me a great deal of the leg work!

My own process for making plain mats has been to machine them from thick n’ chunky .039″ brass sheet on my CNC machine (lately) or have them cut via wire EDM at a service bureau such as emachineshop.com. Once cut, of course, there’s still much to be done before the mat is ready for its plate package but that’s all part of the fun, right?

I want to take this opportunity to explain some of my feelings about this pursuit.  I’ve often said in these pages that I’m not into this medium for its historical value.  Although interesting and important, keeping the process alive is not one of my goals.  Reenactors, living history practitioners, &c. are deep wells of knowledge and some of them have managed to merge two hobbies: history and photography.  In saying all of this I mean no disrespect or malevolence.  Quite the contrary.

The daguerreotype case serves a functional purpose: protection.  Beyond protection all else is ornamental.  I’ve made cases from binder’s board, plywood, solid wood, and aluminum.  I’ve covered cases in wood veneers, lambskin, goatskin, calfskin, shagreen, elephant hide, aluminum sheet.  Where practical I’ve taken a page from the luthier’s trade and inlaid some cases with mother of pearl, paua, and other exotic shells.  I even have designs for some pre-ban ivory.

So, suffice it to say that I’ve made cases in all manner of sizes, colors, and textures.  With a few exceptions most of what I make I’ve never seen anything like in my history books.

Daguerre’s contemporary, Auguste Comte, put it this way: “Love our principle, order our foundation, progress our goal” (Système de Politique Positive).  In order for us to advance our art we must understand its roots.  I had to make up a lot of new rules and procedures but the 19th century DNA is evident in my case designs.  Why not advance your art if you love it and can do so?  Push the boundaries and show people that these photographs don’t have to be stuffy or historically accurate!

Reader Brenton wrote in with this comment:

Just a comment, Ruby Lithographic film works just fine for Becquerel, it can be obtained from any good printers as it is used in the production of the plates.
Please see my new site www.daguerreotypes.co.uk
regards,
Brenton

It’s good to know that the Rubylith works; I thought that it might. I found some generic stuff at my local art supply store in Raleigh that seems to work fine. Thanks for writing in, Brenton.
Every time I start to fret about the materials or supplies that I’m working with (tap water, generic amberlith, polishing compounds of questionable provenance purchased from eBay) I am comforted by the thought that Daguerre and his contemporaries suffered with substandard supplies and made perfectly fine images.

File this under the “Completely Unrelated” department but I find this kind of artwork simply fascinating. The artists have (no doubt) painstakingly recreated and/or invented scents of things as varied as ancient (Ptolemaic) Egyptian perfumes to the recent destruction of Mir.

“There’s also some extinct flowers,” adds Blackson. “Some have been gone for hundreds of years, whilst others have only been extinct for the last 30, due to things like deforestation.”

These scents were devised by James Wong, a botanist at Botanic Gardens Conservation International. “Resurrecting the scent of an extinct plant may seem like something straight out of ‘Jurassic Park’, but the dynamics of the operation are relatively simple, ” he says.

If your travels take you to England before June 9th, make a point to go see this and experience it in person. I wouldn’t count on finding these at your local perfumer.