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| Passion Investments: Art |
Distant Mirrors
Richard John Pietschmann
11/01/2005
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Matthew Isenburg’s collection of daguerreotypes is the stuff of legend among
aficionados of this earliest practical form of photography. Among his 20,000 to
30,000 items of nonpareil daguerreiana, Isenburg estimates that he has 2,000 to
3,000 museum-quality plates. Only important institutions such as George Eastman
House in Rochester, N.Y., and Harvard University exceed Isenburg’s collection in
quantity, and no collection anywhere may match its overall quality. “He has the
premier collection, far better than ours,” notes George Eastman House’s Grant
Romer, one of the experts in the field. The Connecticut collector’s methodology
is simple: “I collect best in class, best of the breed,” he says.
 |  | | TOP: A circa 1850 daguerreotype of gold miners colored by hand. Bottom: One of
three images of the Capitol taken in 1846 by John Plumbe. (Photos courtesy of Matthew Isenburg.) |
Isenburg’s
collection includes valuable one-of-a-kind images made by the finest
portraitists, such as Boston’s Southworth & Hawes studio. Among his images
are the first photographs of the California gold rush, New York City, the
nation’s Capitol and the White House. In terms of market value, he says, “I
can’t see them going anywhere but up.”
For the past decade, the steadily
increasing prices collectors have paid for certain daguerreotype photographs have supported Isenburg’s optimism. In 1995, the art world
sat up and took notice when an image of the Capitol attributed to John Plumbe
sold for $189,500. In 1999, Sotheby’s New York held a landmark auction of 240
Southworth & Hawes daguerreotypes that had languished in collector David
Feigenbaum’s Cape Cod basement for nearly 70 years. Orchestrated by Denise
Bethel, director of Sotheby’s photography department, the auction set numerous
records. The $387,500 paid for Two Women Posed with a Chair paled the previous
auction record of a plate by Southworth & Hawes: $13,800 set just two years
earlier, according to Stephen Perloff, editor of The Photograph Collector, a
monthly newsletter.
| VALUE JUDGMENT: Found until recently in junk bins and curio shops, daguerreotype photographs now
command six and seven figures from enthusiastic collectors. The earliest form of
practical photography, “dags” captured ghostly, 19th-century images that
continue to haunt and inspire. While not all dags command top dollar—some still show up at yard sales—experts predict that the most artistically and technically
exceptional pieces will push the market to even higher levels. |
The $3.3 million sale established daguerreotypes’ place
among collectible photographic art. “Daguerreotype collecting has clearly moved
out of the realm of the antiquarian to the forefront of the photography market,”
Perloff notes. “While the whole daguerreotype market has moved upward, the top
of the market has moved upward exponentially.”Daguerreotypy, the first widely embraced form of
photography, became an international sensation when unveiled in 1839. The first
monochromatic images of people and places on a highly polished silver background
had a stunning impact. Never before had individuals seen the world around
them—or themselves—depicted with such fidelity. “Imagine how limited our
perspective would be if our firsthand information was restricted to what we
could [witness] with our own eyes,” observes Seattle collector Laddie Kite.
“Such was the world before . . . Daguerre [gave us] the first
photographs.”
The French artist, chemist, inventor and entrepreneur
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (Nicephore Niepce collaborated with Daguerre before
the former died in 1833) perfected the process, which used a copper sheet plated
with mirror-polished silver, sensitized by iodine, bromine and chlorine, to
capture a camera image. The exposed plate was developed by mercury vapor, fixed
with a solution of hyposulfite of soda and fitted under glass in a protective
case.
 | | SOUTHWORK & HAWES’ Two Women Posed with a Chair. F(Photo courtesy of Amon Carter Museum.) |
Championed in the United States by famed scientist and inventor Samuel
Morse, daguerreotypes caught on with astonishing speed here. Studios sprang up
within a few months of the French government revealing details of the process.
Early daguerreotypes were crude, but by 1843, advances in technology allowed the
industry to emerge in full flower. Crisp, brilliant images, often artfully
hand-colored, replaced early experimental ones. Portrait studios in large
Eastern cities catered to the rich and famous, while daguerreotypists set up
shop in hundreds of towns and itinerant practitioners roamed the countryside
making portraits and capturing outdoor scenes. Exteriors of cities, buildings,
monuments, ruins and sites precisely recorded historical scenes for the first
time. When the western gold rush kicked off in 1848, daguerreotype images of the
miners, mining camps and other California scenes provided the first instance of
photojournalism.
“The daguerreian period, to me, combines high art, folk art
and history in a richer way than, arguably, any other period in photography,”
says Keith F. Davis, fine art programs director at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City
and curator of the Hallmark Photographic Collection. “It’s a remarkably rich
artistic legacy.”
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