ABSTRACT
Like all daguerreotypists, only a tiny fraction of Newland’s work remains. However, that fraction is larger than most because, as well as being a global and innovative thinker, he was also adept at marketing himself. Relatively unusually for the time, Newland stamped his name into every daguerreotype he made. One laced-gloved hand holds an oriental feather fan and the other holds a tight posy of flowers as it rests on Newland’s familiar cloth-covered studio side table. Newland’s remaining daguerreotypes cut across time and space. Newland’s career had its beginning and its end ‘over the horizon’ from the scene of Maurisset’s ‘La daguerreotypomanie’. His career shows that there were formative geographies for mid-nineteenth-century visuality beyond metropolitan Europe. It demonstrates that the catalyst for Maurisset’s lithograph, photography, cannot be studied in isolation. Daguerreotypes were part of complex webs of texts, images and experiences.
