HF The History of Photography 600pág

The daguerreotype in America
I27
these daguerreotypes, mounted in specially designed frames, were presented to
Queen Victoria, the Kings of Prussia, Saxony, and Wiirttemberg, the Duke of
Brunswick (the birthplace of the Langenheim brothers), and to Daguerre, who sent
them letters of appreciation and presents. The Langenheims' own panorama was
shown at the exhibition which Beaumont Newhall arranged at the Museum of
Modern Art in I937 to celebrate the centenary of Daguerre's first successful picture.
A huge panorama of Cincinnati was taken in September 1848 by CHARLES
FONTAYNE and his partner w. s. PORTER. This 8 ft-long panorama is composed of
eight I2 in. x IO in. daguerreotypes of the Cincinnati waterfront taken from across
the Ohio river in Newport and covering a stretch a little over two miles long.
Other prominent early American daguerreotypists include CHARLES R. MEADE,
M. M. LAWRENCE and JEREMIAH GURNEY, all in New York. EDWARD ANTHONY in
partnership with J. M. EDWARDS opened a portrait studio in Washington, D.C., in
I842 and photographed all the Members of Congress. MARCUS A. ROOT of Philadelphia
was from 1842 to 1846 in partnership with J. E. MAY ALL, later a leading photographer
in London.
The most famous name in the history of American photography is that of MA THEW
B. BRADY (see chapter 22), who has already been mentioned as a pupil of Morse in
I840-41. Before opening his Daguerrean Gallery in New York in I844, Brady was
in business as a manufacturer of daguerreotype cases. In I850 he published twelve
lithographs, copied from daguerreotypes, under the title 'Gallery of Illustrious
Americans', but as the project did not prove a financial success the intended further
series were dropped. The largest collection of Brady daguerreotypes, 311 in number,
was acquired by the Library of Congress in I954, but unfortunately most of them
had already suffered considerable damage through neglect.
A novel business was established by PLATT D. BABBITT in 1853 at the Niagara Falls,
where he was granted a monopoly of the American side. Babbitt set up a pavilion
under which his camera stood in position all day; when a party of sightseers gathered
on the edge of the cliff to admire the Falls he would take them unawares, and of Pl 5 I
course they were always glad to buy the picture as a souvenir. Babbitt was probably
the first to specialize in this kind of tourist photography. Soon after he had obtained
his concession, two men boating on the upper Niagara river got caught in a fast
current, were sucked into the rapids, and their boat smashed on the rocks. One of
them was swept over the Falls at once, but the other clung for eighteen hours to a
log which was jammed between two rocks. All attempts at rescue failed, for the
water rushed past at eighteen to twenty miles an hour, and eventually the doomed
man, exhausted, was swept away. Babbitt took several daguerreotypes, which are
in the nature of early news photographs, and presented one of them to John Werge,
who wrote about the occurrence.23
ROBERT H. VANCE of San Francisco is stated24 to have taken in I850 over 300 wholeplate
daguerreotypes of California : scenery, views in San Francisco, Sacramento and
Monterey, the gold mines and miners at work, Indians on the Pacific Coast, etc. This
interesting collection was exhibited in New York in the autumn of I 8 5 I, when it
was said that they were so arranged that 'a circuit of several miles of scenery can be
seen at a glance'.
s. N. CARVALHO, a Baltimore artist and daguerreotypist, related in his book
Incidents of Travel and Adventure (New York, 1859) his astonishing adventures as
photographer to Col. John C. Fremont's expedition from Westport, Missouri, to
Utah, 1853-54. In crossing the Rocky Mountains during the winter the party nearly
perished, and was forced the abandon all heavy baggage including the daguerreotype