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Take a Look at the ‘Extraordinary’ 19th-Century Portraits Made With Some of the Earliest Methods of Photography
A new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery traces three different 1800s forms of photo-making: daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes
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Photography is an art that often gets taken for granted today. With smartphones now a ubiquitous form of communication, the ability to create high-quality images at any given moment is the norm.
But during photography’s earlier periods, when cameras looked like boxes and accordions, the process of making pictures was much more involved than a single touch to a screen—and often relatively unobtainable for average people. That sliver of art history is the focus of the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition, “From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years.” Featuring images from the gallery’s collection, the exhibition charts the evolution of whole-plate photography from daguerreotype to ambrotype to tintype—documenting the democratization of the craft at the same time.
The daguerreotype, a format invented by the French artist-scientist and eponym Louis Daguerre, was formally announced to the world on August 19, 1839, in Paris. Eventually, the format began popping up in New York City.
“Daguerreotypes are extremely popular in America, pretty much immediately,” says Yechen Zhao, assistant curator of photography and media at the Art Institute of Chicago. “Compared to getting your picture painted, it’s a relatively affordable way to get a portrait. So, there are enormous numbers of portrait studios that appear in cities around America.”
Developing a daguerreotype is an involved process, notes Ann Shumard, senior curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. She calls the daguerreotype a “mirror with a memory.”
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“The daguerreotype is basically a silver-clad copper plate,” says Shumard, who curated the exhibition. The silver plate is polished to a mirror-like finish and then exposed to fumes of iodine and bromine. “That’s what makes the plate light sensitive.”
From there, the technician puts the plate into the camera to get exposed, takes it back out and develops it by exposing the plate to fumes of heated mercury. “When you do that, the image appears,” Shumard says.
The Portrait Gallery features daguerreotypes of U.S. Senators Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, as well as a lithograph of the latter. Daguerreotyping initially required silver-clad plates that were manufactured in France and had to be shipped to the United States. Thus, “it required a certain amount of capital to get into the photographic business and make these things, which is why you have some very high-end studios and often very artistic-looking results,” says Douglas Nickel, an art historian at Brown University.
The daguerreotype of John C. Calhoun was what led Shumard to consider other early photographic works in the museum’s collections. “It’s really quite an extraordinary piece,” she says. “And I got to stop and think, how many other whole-plate daguerreotypes do we have?” So, she identified a few others in their collection, which led to a broader search: “I knew we had at least one whole-plate ambrotype, and then it was, ‘How many tintypes?’ And then I was like, ‘Gosh, this could be a show we’ve got.’”
After the daguerreotype, photography evolved into the ambrotype, a process using glass with collodion emulsion to make an image that appears positive when backed with dark material. (Collodion is a syrupy liquid made by dissolving nitrocellulose in alcohol and ether.) The ambrotype process was first created by English photographer Frederick Scott Archer and later, in 1854, the American photographer James Ambrose Cutting secured patents on modifications to the process.
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“You basically end up with a syrupy mixture that gets poured over the glass plate to completely cover it from end to end,” Shumard says. Then the plate is sensitized by being put into a bath of silver nitrate.
After the whole plate is put into the camera, the lens cap is removed, allowing light to pass through the lens to the plate in the camera and exposing the image for development. Then, as the result is still a negative image, the photographer must put something dark, like black lacquer or black fabric, behind the glass plate to make the image positive.
The exhibition showcases an ambrotype of American landscape artist John Frederick Kensett.
Also on display is a tintype of an unidentified African American woman, taken by an unidentified artist around 1865. The tintype format was introduced by chemist and physicist Hamilton Smith in 1856.
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Unlike an ambrotype, a tintype’s sheet iron has already been coated with black material before the collodion emulsion is added.
“It actually isn’t made of tin; it’s made of iron,” Shumard says. “If anyone ever wants to know whether or not they have a tintype, they just have to check it out with a magnet. If it’s attracted to the magnet, then it’s a tintype.”
And compared with daguerreotypes, tintypes were much cheaper to make and easier to transport. “A tintype can be made basically by a guy in a tent on the side of the road,” Zhao says. “It’s much more accessible in the sense that you don’t have to be in a big city to go to a studio. It might be a guy who’s just traveling around making them.”
The introduction of tintypes to photography also made for a wider breadth of photographic subjects, including emancipated Black people fighting in the Civil War—the period that also served as the moment in which Mathew Brady, the photographer behind two of the portraits in the exhibition, became the “father of photojournalism.”
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The tintype marked a more attainable method of visual representation—but not necessarily through technological innovation, Nickel explains.
“It makes cheaper photographs,” he says. “So, if you’re talking about these as democratizing, that basically just means more people could afford them.”