Upon its introduction in 1839, the daguerreotype was hailed as a magical reflection of reality. Today, these early examples of the first practical photographic process offer fascinating windows into the past. The daguerreotypes collected here not only document the birth of photography and its aesthetic and historical legacy but also provide insight into French art and culture. Lavishly illustrated, this volume is the first complete catalog of the French daguerreotype collection of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House. Janet E. Buerger uses this remarkable collection of images to produce a cultural history of the daguerreotype's most learned following—an elite group of mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals who sought to understand and develop the usefulness, potential, and beauty of this camera image. This varied group, including entrepreneurs, painters, scientists, and historians, enables Buerger to trace the influence of photography into virtually every area of nineteenth-century European intellectual life.

In 1842, the pioneering French photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804–1892) set out eastward across the Mediterranean, daguerreotype equipment in tow. He spent the next three years documenting lands that were then largely unknown to the West, including Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, in some of the earliest surviving photographic images of these places. Monumental Journey, the first monograph in English on this brilliant yet enigmatic artist, explores the hundreds of daguerreotypes Girault made during his unprecedented trip, offering a rare, early look at sites and cities that have since been altered—sometimes irrevocably—by urban, environmental, and political change. Beautiful full-scale reproductions of Girault’s photographs, many published here for the first time, and incisive essays shed new light on the arc of his career and his groundbreaking contributions to the burgeoning fields of photography, archaeology, and architectural history. Monumental Journey presents an artist of astonishing innovation whose work occupies a singular space at the border of history and modernity, tradition and invention, endurance and evanescence. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the most common method of photography was the daguerreotype—Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s miraculous invention that captured in a camera visual images on a highly polished silver surface through exposure to light. In this book are presented nearly eighty masterpieces—many never previously published—from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s extensive daguerreotype collection.

Focusing specifically on portraiture as a genre, this volume challenges scholarly assumptions that regard interior spaces as uniquely feminine. Contributors analyze portraits of men in domestic and studio spaces in France during the long nineteenth century; the preponderance of such portraits alone supports the book's premise that the alignment of men with public life is oversimplified and more myth than reality. The volume offers analysis of works by a mix of artists, from familiar names such as David, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Rodin, and Matisse to less well-known image makers including Dominique Doncre, Constance Mayer, Anders Zorn and Lucien-Etienne Melingue. The essays cover a range of media from paintings and prints to photographs and sculpture that allows exploration of the relation between masculinity and interiority across the visual culture of the period. The home and other interior spaces emerge from these studies as rich and complex locations for both masculine self-expression and artistic creativity. Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789-1914 provides a much-needed rethinking of modern masculinity in this period.

Some account of the origin and early history of the photography. Daguerreotype manufacturing and historical daguerreotype process. Recognition, identification and classification of hallmarks on daguerreotype plates; tables with images and reference codes for cataloging hallmarks. Hallmarks impressed on daguerreotype plates can provide precious information on the area of ​​origin, on the producer, on the eventual importer and sometimes also on the photographic studio and the date of production. Most daguerreotypes have long been considered anonymous. The hallmarks impressed on the plates tell a different story and open the way to consider signed daguerreotypes by known makers.

Sign wars -- The Art of signing -- Ancient gestures, modern signs -- French ancients and moderns -- The Deaf in the harem -- The Deafness of the ancients -- Philosophy and the sign -- Sign at the salon -- Signs of the revolution -- Signs and Citizens : Regeneration and the Deaf -- The Politics of Deafness -- The Normal and the pathological -- David's studio and the Deaf -- The Mimicry of mimesis : Morality, sign and pathology -- Mimicry, copying and orginality -- Revolt and organization -- Cultural politics -- A Culture of gestures -- Mimicry and mimesis -- Visualizing Anthropology : Touch, the hand and gesture -- Evolutionism, art, and the sign -- The Silent monument -- Milan and after -- A Deaf Variety of Modernism? : Republican morality -- The Deaf artists and the museum -- Gesture and hysteria -- Deaf Republicans -- Deaf artists and the Third Republic -- The Deaf and the Dreyfus Affair -- Eugenics and the Deaf -- Deaf moderns -- Anthropology and philosophy -- Art history -- Deaf culture.