ABSTRACT
During the Civil War, more than two decades after daguerreotypes were introduced in the United States in 1839, photography still captivated Americans and was at the height of its popularity. Its inventor, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, had proudly boasted of his accomplishment in terms of harnessing nature to perform at his will: “I have found a way of fixing the images of the camera! I have seized the fleeting light and imprisoned it! I have forced the sun to paint pictures for me!” (Hirsch vii). In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, these ‘sun-pictures’ performed important cultural work. As Richard Rudisill explains, the daguerreotype influenced American life in three key ways:
Initially the new medium directly encouraged cultural nationalism. Its pictures were clear affective images reflecting and reiterating many impulses toward the definition of an ‘American’ character. At another level of consciousness, the invention of photography helped Americans adjust themselves intuitively to the transition from an agrarian to a technological society in that these images were produced with a reliable mechanical tool. Important as are both of these functions, however, it is at the level of the spirit that we must seek for the most essential operation of the daguerreotype in American life. It both reflected and activated national faith in spiritual insight and truth obtained from perceiving the works of God in nature.
(5)