ABSTRACT
On August 19, 1839, the Palace of the Institutein Paris was filled with curious Parisians who had come to hear the formal description of the new reproduction process invented by Louis Daguerre. Daguerre, already well known for his Diorama, called the new process daguerreotype. According to a contemporary, “a few days later,
opticians’ shops were crowded with amateurs panting for daguerreotype apparatus, and everywhere cameras were trained on buildings. Everyone wanted to record the view from his window, and he was lucky who at first trial got a silhouette of roof tops against the sky.”1 The media frenzy had begun. Within five months more than thirty
different descriptions of the technique had been published around the world-Barcelona, Edinburgh, Naples, Philadelphia, St. Petersburg, Stockholm. At first, daguerreotypes of architecture and landscapes dominated the public’s imagination; two years later, after various technical improvements to the process had been made, portrait galleries had opened everywhere-and everyone rushed to have her picture taken by the new media machine.2
