The Scenic Daguerreotype: Romanticism and Early Photography
Imagine a "gold and mercury image on a layer of silver bonded to copper," an all-metal photographic process that poisoned some its practitioners. Imagine an era long before a surfeit of images began to dull the viewer, when a visual reality--not a virtual one--captivated the imagination. The daguerreotype process is not only "one of the great artistic vehicles for rendering the human face," says John Wood, but an equally potent and elegant means of rendering a scenic image. The author has assembled the largest collection of daguerreotypes ever seen in book form, including Jean-Louis-Baptiste Gros's masterful studies of the Acropolis and the Seine, and Joseph Wilhelm Pero's striking images of Lubeck, Germany.