Roger Watson - Capturing the Light: The Birth of Photography, a True Story of Genius and Rivalry

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Contents

Jai captur la lumire fugitive et lai emprisonne! Jai contraint le soleil peindre des images pour moi!

[I have captured the light and arrested its flight! The sun itself shall draw my pictures!]

Louis Daguerre,

letter to Charles Chevalier 1839

I hope it will be borne in mind by those who take an interest in this subject, that in what I have hitherto done, I do not profess to have perfected an Art, but to have commenced one; the limits of which it is not possible at present exactly to ascertain.

I only claim to have based this new Art upon a secure foundation: it will be for more skilful hands than mine to rear the superstructure.

Henry Fox Talbot,

letter to the editor of The Literary Gazette, 1839

1 JANUARY 1859

MY FIRST DAGUERREOTYPE.

There never was anything like it. True, a multitude of types and graphs have been brought out since then, and glass and paper and iron and leather and divers vehicles have been covered with impressions, and I have seen them, but nothing ever filled my eye so completely as that first daguerreotype.

For hours I have held it, carefully noting all the soft minutiae of light and shade: and still the little rough-edged silver tablet was a joy forever, discovering some merit of complete similitude hitherto unnoted; it seemed inexhaustible, yielding new pleasure as often as consulted.

A small and pleasant village in central Indiana was the locus of this primitive achievement; the time I think, the fall of 1842. Seth, my coadjutor and compeer in the enterprise, and myself were denizens of a cosy Law Office, in the second story of an unpretending building, where we tumbled the musty tomes of legal lore, hoping in good time to make lawyers of ourselves. Seth was an artist, that is, he had wielded a pencil in his day and produced some landscapes, and even portraits which were not without merit; at least, so said the knowing ones, who pronounced him a genius undeveloped, and bewailed his aberration in reading law. At one time he had tried his hand at farming, being beguiled by the smell of new-mown hay, or more probably by the per-diem to the harvest hands, (for Seth was poor.) But that was only a temporary expedient, and he did not take kindly to association with those whose talk was of oxen. I may mention that he afterwards turned up at New Orleans, where he verified the predictions of his quondam friends, by making a sensation in the way of landscapes and of portraits, and so the world lost a poor lawyer and gained a reputable artist.

Having an eye out for the new and curious, I had seen some time before intimations in the public prints of a wonderful French discovery in the art of portraiture, whereby it seemed quite probable there was a royal road to drawing and picture-making; and indeed, that the time was not distant, when one might look in a mirror, and leave his image sticking there. But as greater marvels have in like manner been announced and never heard of afterwards, I was disposed to regard this new wonder as belonging to the same class, until I saw another account of the mystery, and this time coupled with the more tangible statement, that the images of a camera obscura were made permanently visible, and giving a kind of outline of the method.

Seth and I talked over the new discovery for several days, determining, if possible, to verify our deductions by a practical test, and with a view to elicit all the paragraph contained, and to obtain a more complete clue to the modus operandi, we tried our hand on interpretation, and by dint of different emphasis and modulation, we thought we could more completely evolve the seeming mystery. The result of this unfledged exercise of legal acumen was, that silver plates properly exposed to the vapors of iodine, and thus coated with a thin film of a yellow or golden color, became sensitive to the action of light and received the image, which could be made visible by the fumes of mercury, and rendered permanent by a wash of salt and water The rest was easy of accomplishment, and with the judicious employment of pocket knives, tacks, paste, and the division of labor, a cigar box was soon transformed into a camera

A regular built picture, by jingo!, said Seth, as we slipped it into the salt water and admitted the light. Sure enough, there it was. The iodine was slowly clearing off; and as more light was admitted we saw our miniature landscapethat old shed, with its water-stained shingles in the fore-ground, the barn yard and its carts and wagons, and even those horsesa little misty, to be surebut that white horse was unmistakable. The building in the distancethe church and its steeple, and the leafless trees. There was a dim, hazy look about the horizon, and a sad want of what I have since learned to denominate aerial perspective; but Seth said that softening down of the harsh lines was decidedly artistical. To me, it seemed a realization of what I suppose everybody has thought ofthe skilful combination of all the elements of that delicate frost work which we see on the windows of a cold morning into the perfect semblance of a real and familiar scene.

After repeated rinsings we dried it on the stove. I confess there was quite a crystalization of salt on the surface, and some streaks, but still there was a pictureto me an inexhaustible source of wonder and admiration. Afterwards I progressed somewhat in the art; adopted new improvements, and took likenesses of learned lawyers, with numberless imposing looking volumes piled on the table beside them; sentimental young ladies with guitars in their hands, and beautiful bouquets in the back ground; matronly ladies, with pocket handkerchiefs of table-cloth dimensions; children, with staring eyes and corkscrew faces, and love-sick swains who persisted in sitting with a huge hand placed over the region of the heart, and who brought back the picture after a few days because the heart was on the wrong side.

All these, of course, I admired exceedinglybut still, I repeat, there never was anything like that first daguerreotype!

Chapter One

THE LOCKED TREASURE ROOM

Man has always been fascinated by the sun, from the primeval days of his existence when he first stood erect on the great wide savannahs of Africa and gazed up at it through protecting fingers. To him the sun was not just a potent force, a god the giver of life, food, warmth the regulator of his very existence it was also the giver of light. In the book of Genesis light was Gods first creation and sunlight for ever after became the fount of an age-old puzzle which, from the moment man began marshalling his thoughts in written form, he longed to solve.

With the dawn of civilization and the creation of the very first written texts, be it on clay tablets, stone or parchment, the quest to capture the light and channel it that inbuilt human desire to harness the natural elements and make them work for us first entered the minds of thinkers and scholars around the world. In the fifth century BCE the Chinese philosopher Mozi was one of the first to talk of the power of light and spoke of a device for passing sunlight through a pinhole onto a collecting plate, its mysterious function being that of a locked treasure room a kind of lightproof box that would channel the power of the sun in such a way that man could safely observe it and the images of the recognized world outside that it projected.