3-1-2006
Tonight I will be demonstrating my Daguerreotype process at Through This Lens in Durham, NC. I hope to see a nice turnout, it should be a lot of fun!
The past seven days has been my most productive since I learned how to make Daguerreotypes in the first place: a (personal) record-breaking three images! The pieces aren’t yet in cases but I should be able to crank out the cases in the next couple of weeks.
I tried to make an image last night and I can’t figure out what went wrong. This, however, does not surprise me. It is a defining characteristic of the art of the Daguerreotype to expect hours of effort to yield a completely useless product. It would be one thing if I just botched the exposure (a mistake I make with alarming frequency) but it’s pretty rare that I wind up with a *blank* plate at the end of the cycle.
Jerry Spagnoli told me once about a student that could not get an image on her plate no matter what she tried. Finally, it was discovered after several trials that the poor woman had gotten confused in the darkroom and loaded the plate holder backwards. I certainly don’t intend to poke fun at this person as I have done excitingly stupid things in my own past and continue to do so. Instead, my point is to express the wisdom that this process requires careful experimentation and record-keeping in order to wind up with an image.
-Jonathan