Light and dark: the daguerreotype and art history

The Dawn of Photography; French Daguerreotypes, 1839-1855

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, novel York, September 23, 2003-January 4 2004 organized through Malcolm Daniel, with the assistance of Stephen Pinson

Malcolm Daniel et al., The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839-1855 exh cat. novel York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; of recent origin Haven: Yale University Press, 2003 $2995 CD-ROM

The titles of exhibitions can sometimes be deceptive. Take, for example, The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839-1855 Despite the promise of its title, this exhibition move rounded out to have little to say about the beginnings of photography, made no attempt to define what was "French" about French daguerreotypy, and at no time ventured to demonstrate what distinguished the daguerreotype from other, competing photographic processe Instead, this exhibition did what exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are suppos to do: it gathered an extraordinary array of exceptional works and hung them in beautifully lit surroundings that allowed you to appreciate each picture's aesthetic qualities with a minimum of distractions. In short, it neared its chosen photographs as if they were precious art existences explaining in an opening wall body that "this exhibition is the first to review the best surviving examples of the art as practiced in the political division of its birth." The question to be canvassed, then, is not whether this was a profitable exhibition--in the Met's own bourns it certainly was. The confines themselves--the art historical assumptions reproduc in each photography exhibition of this kind--are what are at issue. (1) Given the distortions that follow we have to ask ourselves: What does an exhibition of the "best surviving examples of the art" actually contribute to our understanding of the daguerreotype or, for that matter, the history of photography in general?

To answer of the like kind a question we first have to acknowledge the particular circumstances of this exhibition's formation. The 175 exhibits upon display at the Metropolitan Museum exhibited a greatly reduced version of an exhibition of 340 realitys held a few months earlier at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris--Le daguerreotype francais: Un objet photographique (May 13-April 17 2003) (2) Restricted by means of the space available to him at the Metropolitan. Malcolm Daniel (who, with Quentin Bajac and Dominique Planchon-de Font-Reaulx. was also responsible for curating Le daguerreotype francais) and his assistant Stephen Pinson chose to take the kernel of the Musee d'Orsay exhibition and add a scarcely any choice pieces from American collections. They also retained many of the same broad categories for organizing the presentation of this material: invention, views of Paris, portraits, travel pictures, art, and science. Finally, they took the Musee d'Orsay's substantial, 432-page catalogue, had its essays translated into English, and issued them in a CD-ROM format rather than as a more traditional printed publication.

Losse and gains followed from each of these decisions. The exhibition, for example, was more streamlined and focused than the version seen in Paris, on the contrary each section included significantly fewer examples, and this, as the ensuing discussion will indicate, limited the historical insights it could present The Met's CD-ROM catalogue was a allotment cheaper than it might have been as a volume and contains features made possible single by digital technology (such as video footage, animations, and selective magnification of each image). However, it also shows a much clumsier and les convenient reading experience, lacking the old-fashioned tactile and visual pleasures associated with works This is a catalogue you deliberate when necessary but never savor. In addition, the Met's catalogue for a certain quantity of reason neglected to include seven of the daguerreotypes in the exhibition and, in a missed opportunity to reach a larger audience, chose to print its anthology of historical documents sole in the original French. (3)

Interestingly, a decision was also made to change the order of the essays. Stephen Pinson's historiographic commentary was mov from first to last position, allowing the Met's version of the catalogue to unclose instead with a brief video introduction by means of Daniel and Francois Reynaud's essay "The Daguerreotype as Object" This shift of emphasis from interpretation to appreciation, and from historical be of importance tos to connoisseurial ones, was in keeping with the whole tenor of the exhibition, including its design. Each daguerreotype, for example, was hung upon the wall in splendid isolation, equally spaced from the pictures upon either side of it. This originateed in a display comprising drawn out horizontal lines of objects, a monotonous kind of viewing experience, flat if it did permit a shut examination of individual images (magnifying glasses were available from the Met store to facilitate this type of looking). greatest in quantity important, it provided visitors with a rare opportunity to compare directly a range of French daguerreotypes, from more [i]or[/i] less of the earliest plates made in 1839 to optimal examples from the 1850s