Page 38 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre: Boulevard du Temple Daguerreotype 1838
In many ways, Daguerre was the first media-entrepreneur of the modern age, launching the product of his researches with his late partner Nicéphore Niépce in 1839 to top a career characterised by media- innovations designed for mass entertainment (including the Diorama Theatre 1832). His most successful - globally successful - product was of course the World’s first photographic system - the Daguerreotype. This was a result of Daguerre’s researches (that began with Niépce, but continued after Niépce’s death in 1833) and resulted in a process that involved a silvered copper-sheet, coated with photo-sensitive silver iodide, which could be exposed in a camera. Daguerre made the important discovery, missed in his earlier experiments with Niépce, that a short exposure could form a ‘latent’ image on the silver-plate, that could later be developed with chemicals - heated mercury vapour - and fixed (de-sensitised to light) with salt water (or later Herschel’s hyposulphate). This produced a positive, one-off, sharp, jewel-like photographic image. Daguerre dominated the early years of photography but soon the advantages of Fox Talbot’s negative-positive process were obvious to everyone.
Although the Daguerreotype was ultimately an historical cul-de-sac, it was the technology that introduced photography to the world, and it was a highly successful artistic medium - as works by Camille Silvy, André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, Antoine François Jean Claudet and Daguerre himself indicate. Unlike the paper-reproduction model of Fox Talbot’s Calotype, the Daguerreotype was a precious, silvery one-off - a reversal photograph as a jewel embodied upon a shiny metal plate, and importantly in the very early days of photography, it produced a very sharp, crystalline image. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out in Understanding Media, when a medium is superseded by innovation, the older medium becomes an art form. So for most of the 19th and into the 20th century, the daguerreotype is another of the older forms of photography, (like the cyanotype, tintype, silver-print, carbon-print, etc) that has become a medium favoured by craft-artist-experimenters entranced with the intrinsic qualities of this medium.