Jonathan A Lewis Photography

Jul 25

Houdini

Category: Books,Daguerreotypy

A lot has happened since my last post. Unfortunately nothing photographically related has really happened. I moved to a new abode that’s a bit closer to my work. Now I can walk to work and save on gas and get exercise and all that good stuff. It’s also nice to take a camera a long and shoot as I go.

Anyway, to the real stuff.

Earlier this week I got the first two volumes of the History of Photography journal consisting of 8 issues from 1977 and 1978. I got the set because it contains an article that was mentioned in the DagForum and I wanted to check it out. The article is The Daguerreotype in America and England after 1860 by Grant B. Romer. As the title indicates, it traces the practice of daguerreotypy from the demise of its popularity though to the present day (well, the mid 1970s). I have read here and there that “since its creation, the daguerreotype has always had practitioners somewhere” but I guess it really never soaked in. I really believed that the daguerreotype had completely died out in the mid 1860s until the likes of Romer and Pobboravsky revived it in the 1970s. This article describes how there was always someone, somewhere, fascinated and dedicated enough to pursue the medium. Like Houdini, no matter how hidden it may be, it was alway somewhere…

I particularly like this quote and even though it doesn’t really fit in with the rest of my post. Although it refers to the end of the daguerreian era, I think this it holds true in the new digital age as well:

As Marcus Aurelius Root, the early champion of photograph as a fine art, sorrowfully observed:

‘… the majority of heliographers have adopted the vocation from motives purely mercenary. That is, the desire and the hope of making money more rapidly, and of avoiding manual labor….’

 

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