By Ronald S. Coddington
Jesse Harrison Whitehurst knew the ebbs and flows of the photography business better than most of his contemporaries. The daguerreian pioneer had a knack for adapting to new innovations, and keen sense of trends and fashion that propelled him to prominence. He rode a wave of success and established a chain of studios along the East coast.
Business however, had fallen off by the late 1850s. An economic downturn and an increasingly unstable political situation likely contributed to the reversal of his fortunes. By 1861, the Whitehurst Empire had shrunk to a single gallery in the nation’s capital.
Then came the war. Whitehurst, a native Virginian in his early forties, saw an opportunity to revive his empire. Following the Union debacle at First Bull Run, he launched a newspaper advertising campaign that targeted patriotic citizen soldiers and their families. “Selling views of military encampments, & c. See his card photographs, suitable for sending in letters. Likenesses of many of the slain at the recent battle can be obtained at this gallery. Go to Whitehurst’s and obtain a likeness before going to the battle field.”
Whitehurst understood that the latest fashion in likenesses—the card photograph—coincided propitiously with the start of the Civil War, and could become big business.
But even Whitehurst could not have predicted that the card photograph, better known as the carte de visite, would develop into a social media phenomenon in America during the war years—the Facebook of the 1860s. The excitement generated by the carte de visite was perhaps the greatest since the birth of photography.
The Rise and Fall of the Daguerreotype
Whitehurst was about 20 years old when photography was discovered in 1839. The vast majority of citizen soldiers to whom he marketed his studio services were the first to be born into a world with photography. They were the ‘Photography Generation.’
In January 1839, Frenchman Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre announced the first successful commercial photographic process. As an artist who had used the camera obscura as a drawing aid to project images onto surfaces, he determined to find a repeatable method to permanently fix these projections to a surface. Daguerre was not alone in this pursuit. Fellow Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, an artist who became fascinated with the process of lithography, had spent two decades searching for a solution. He had achieved several breakthroughs, including his hazy View from the Window at Le Gras, produced in 1826 or 1827, which is widely acknowledged as the first photograph.
Niépce and Daguerre joined forces in 1829. After Niépce died in 1833, Daguerre pressed forward, and, in 1835, he found the right combination of photosensitive chemicals and other materials. He spent the next few years perfecting his process. When he finally released the news to the world, the effect was electric.
Word traveled quickly to America, where the daguerreotype was hailed as ‘Rembrandt perfected.’ Firsthand accounts from Americans in France were widely published during that heady spring of 1839, including one letter by a Mr. Walsh. “I was admitted to M. Daguerre’s laboratory, and passed an hour in contemplating his drawings. It would be impossible for me to express the admiration which they produced. I can convey to you no idea of the exquisite perfection of the copies of objects and scenes, effected in ten minutes by the action of simple solar light upon his papiers sensibles. There is one view of the river Seine, bridges, quays, great edifices, &c., taken under a rainy sky, the graphic truth of which astonished and delighted me beyond measure. No human hand ever did or could trace a copy.”
Mr. Walsh came away with the impression that Daguerre’s images were produced on sensitive paper when, in fact, highly polished silver-plated copper was used. Another observer in France at this historic moment would not miss this detail—respected artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, who shared his impressions in another published letter. The images he described after a visit with Daguerre, “are produced on a metallic surface, the principal pieces about 7 inches by 5, and they resemble aquatint engravings, for they are in simple chiaro oscuro, and not in colors. But the exquisite minuteness of the delineation cannot be conceived. No painting or engraving ever approached it.”
Having noted the lack of color and abundance of detail, Morse also called out a limitation caused by long exposure times. “Objects moving are not impressed. The Boulevard so constantly filled with a moving throng of pedestrians and carriages, was perfectly solitary, except an individual who was having his boots brushed. His feet were compelled, of course, to be stationary for some time, one being on the box of the boot-black, and the other on the ground. Consequently, his boots and legs are well defined, but he is without body or head because these were in motion.”
Yet, the strengths of the daguerreotype outweighed its weaknesses. Before Daguerre, painters and engravers chronicled our visual history. After Daguerre, photographers emerged as the preferred recorders, though many traditional artists and art critics looked askance upon the fledgling medium and its practitioners.
Instructions for how to produce a daguerreotype rapidly travelled across the Atlantic. Entrepreneurs in New York City, Boston, Cincinnati, New Orleans and elsewhere quickly mastered the medium.
These pioneers and those who followed spread photography to the far corners of antebellum America. Galleries with distinctive skylights cut into the roofs popped up in bustling Northern cities, bucolic Southern towns and rough and tumble frontier settlements. Most of these painters of light toiled anonymously in cramped studios and eked out a modest living. Some, most notably Mathew B. Brady, rose to fame and prosperity as photographer to the power elite. A small number lived a nomadic existence, lugging their camera and equipment by wagon from town to town.
Photo pioneers required a long list of supplies to sustain their businesses, including chemicals, plates, mats, cases and numerous other items. And, industrious manufacturers seized the opportunity. In Waterbury, Conn., the Scovill family had produced buttons and provided other hardware since the turn-of-the-century. In 1840, the company began production of metal plates to meet the growing demand by daguerreian photographers. Within a few years, the company became one of the nation’s leading suppliers of photographic supplies.