Silver Practise: The 1847 Daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson

Copyright 2021 by Jonathan Morse

Fr593, “I watched the moon around the house”

The House of the Seven Gables, chapter 6

1. Elemental

By Emily Dickinson’s time, artists had long been using a simple apparatus called the camera obscura to project an image onto a surface and then trace its forms. The Latin term translates as “dark room,” and during the Renaissance Leonardo and Dürer used it to bring the lighted outdoors in and domesticate it. Here, from 1752, is a how-to.

https://wellcomecollection.org/works/fkvmntbq

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By the 1820s, at the beginning of the age of modern chemistry, a next step in the evolution of the technology was beginning to make itself conceivable: a way to affix the camera obscura’s ephemeral images to a page and make them permanent. One possibility that then came to mind originated in the newly understood chemistry of silver.

Everyone had observed that tarnished silver grows darker when it is exposed to light, and what occurred to the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce was to load a sheet of silver into a camera and let the light entering through the lens burn shadows into it. The chemical process is now known as photoreduction. Under its influence, light replaces some of the transparent silver chloride moiety of the tarnish with black molecules of metallic silver. Niépce’s first exposure times were measured in full days, but at the end of the first successful day he had succeeded in making

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a permanent shadow out of light and bringing it under the control of time and man.

In England, William Henry Fox Talbot had been silversmithing with light in a different way. His camera was loaded not with a sheet of metallic silver but with a sheet of paper soaked in silver chloride, and after exposing that and treating it with a chemical reducing agent he had what he came to call a negative: an image, dark with metallic silver where the subject before the camera had been illuminated, and the white of undarkened paper where the subject had been dark. When light was then passed through that negative to a second sheet of sensitized paper, the exchange of light for dark was rereversed and Talbot found himself holding in his hand a simulacrum of the world. There on that first slip of paper the negative-positive photographic system had come into

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existence: the process that would simply be photography from then until the advent of the digital era at the end of the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, the first images that Talbot revealed to the world in 1839 were impressive only as concepts.

Because he had made his paper negatives from ordinary stationery, his positives suffered from low resolution and low contrast. He was later able to improve the negatives a little by substituting translucent waxed paper, but it wasn’t until 1851 that Frederick Scott Archer succeeded in layering a photosensitive emulsion onto glass.

In France, meanwhile, Niépce had died in 1833. His work went on, however, in the hands of Jacques Daguerre, a painter of dioramas who used a camera obscura to compose his room-filling canvases. In 1839, the same year as Talbot, he too displayed his first photographs. It was

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those, the first daguerreotypes, that came before the world as a revelation. They were images in a medium that never had been seen before: a magic mirror glittering with the details of previously invisible reality.

They were the outcome of a process that was technologically a dead end, almost incapable of further development. Unlike the talbotype with its single negative and infinitely reproducible positives, each daguerreotype was unique, and reproducible only by rephotographing.* Also, it was not a slip of inexpensive paper; it was a shiny

* Some daguerreotype cameras were made with multiple lenses in order to record more than one image at a time. The need for reproducibility was real and was felt, and expedients usable only at the beginning of the images’ future history weren’t much of a substitute.

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film of silver-mercury amalgam deposited with much labor on a copper plate from which it could then be erased as easily as a poem from a blackboard. It had to be protected behind glass, and it could be seen only from certain angles.

Look at Miss Emily’s delicate image the wrong way and all you’ll see is glare and your own unreflective self. The wrong ways are many, too, and the right way is only one.

But the life Miss Emily’s image reveals if it does let you see it will be a life lived in the biology of colloid: a life without sharp edges, where all the demarcations turn out to be aberration. Under a microscope, all that a silverhalide or digital photograph can reveal of the previously unseen will be what photographers call grain: a heap of jagged black or white or colored silver-halide crystals, or of a sensor’s individual pixels. Existing only as artifacts of the process, these depict nothing in themselves but are run

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together by the mind to create the optical illusion of an organism whose actual life is curve. On cheap paper, comic strips approximate life and its senses that way: on the cheap, with the help of an optical illusion called the benday process. But (as the first viewers of Daguerre’s images marveled) the colloidal life revealed by Daguerre’s magic mirror isn’t to be put off by such optical sloppiness.

Look at that life under the scope and it will force more of its rounded self on you, and then more still. Its visible abundance will be limited only by the resolving power of the lenses through which you try to see it, and if and when you stop trying to see more, what stops you may be what Dickinson called awe and David called the beginning of wisdom.

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Daguerreotype portrait of Albert Sands Southworth by Albert Sands Southworth or Josiah Johnson Hawes. Metropolitan Museum, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/283178

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2. Everyday: 1847 and after

The image you have just seen was the work of the Boston studio of Southworth and Hawes, perhaps the richest atelier in nineteenth-century America, in any art.

Compared with Southworth and Hawes, the “Daguerrian artist” William C. North, who photographed Dickinson at some time between December 10, 1846 and late March 1847 (Bernhard 596), wasn’t much more than a journeyman. About the standardized pose to which Dickinson submitted at his hands, she herself might have been ready in advance to think, “I see New Englandly,” followed by

The Queen, discerns like me – Provincially –

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(Fr256, “The robin’s my criterion for tune”). After all, her pose had been pre-endorsed by provincials presiding over agricultural fairs.

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Vermont Phoenix (Brattleboro, Vt.), June 3, 1847, p. 3

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A provincial consequence was this, as made available in photographic reproduction by the Amherst College Library, which holds the original daguerreotype.

https://www.amherst.edu/library/archives/holdings/edickinson/dickinsondag

Dickinson herself seems to have disapproved of it, on the general metaphysical grounds that a photographic portrait is a life mask which morphs into a death mask and mask of

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shame. In the 1860s photographic cartes de visite like the ones described in Henry James’s “The Real Thing” were popular, but when Thomas Wentworth Higginson requested a contribution to his album from Miss Dickinson, she declined. With a flourish of aesthetic theory, she added,

It often alarms Father – He says Death might occur, and he has Molds of all the rest – but has no Mold of me, but I noticed the Quick wore off those things, in a few days, and forestall the dishonor – (JL268, July 1862)

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But un-Dickinsonian posterity too has complained of disappointment, and from the very beginning. Two full pages in Polly Longsworth’s The World of Emily Dickinson are a record of the early retouchings at the behest of family members with war-between-the-houses propaganda to broadcast, and as of the twenty-first century Photoshop

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encourages re-visions of its own, on its own. Its Emily Barbie has even gone retro at last. Caroling, “I never saw a moor, I never saw the sea,” she now blacks out regret with an analog camera.

Amanda Wagner, “Impressive Technology Recreates Life-like Renders of 20 Historical Figures.” http://livestly.com, May 20, 2019

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3. And then Photoshop detoured through the library

The Daguerrian artist’s own retro handiwork is still in its archived place, curated and conserved. It is never again to be changed, and so it becomes harder to see every year because every year our ways of seeing do change. After quite a short historical intermission, no one remains to remember the marvelousness of mercury first seen on silver, or even to agree on what it may mean that a particular silver sliver in Massachusetts was once illuminated by Emily Dickinson’s own reflected light. After that light failed a few blocks distant on May 15, 1886, it was not to be turned back on in the Amherst College Library.

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But the Amherst College Library has done its best to survive in the vicinity of the simulacra of Dickinson’s light that remain. The link above on page 12 will take you to an update which struts the daguerreotype down a runway one last time, this time with its frame taken off and its grimed surface bathed.

And Photoshop and I have done the glass Duchamp thing with that: stripped the bride bare. In the photographic reproduction posted online by ACL, her original now looks like this.

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Post Photoshop, and with a black surround added to bring out contrast, it now resembles this.

On this silver revision, time’s inflictions are more visible than they once seemed to be. The scratches on the plate

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insist that we pay attention to them, and it’s now possible to notice that Daguerrian artist North’s prop book was badly used in the course of its travels. What Photoshop and I did with it and Mr. North’s sitter was to take the Amherst College reproduction in hand, roll it under Photoshop’s Exposure, Gamma Correction, and Sharpen sliders, and then (in an attempt at electronically simulating a nineteenth-century daguerreotypist’s “gilding” bath of gold chloride, which would have browned the image’s surface and reduced glare from its mirrory highlights) apply Nik’s Brilliance/Warmth and Vibrance/Saturation filters.

One clinical outcome is this: it now appears that teenaged Emily had acne.

On the other hand, look now at her eyes.

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And decide for yourself: is their silver once again legal tender?

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For further reading: about Talbot and Daguerre Malcolm Daniel, “Daguerre (1797-1851) and the Invention of Photography.” https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dagu/hd_dagu.htm

Malcolm Daniel, “William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) and the Invention of Photography.” https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/tlbt/hd_tlbt.htm

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About the 1847 daguerreotype of Dickinson and its early retouched versions

Mary Elizabeth Kromer Bernhard, “Lost and Found: Emily Dickinson’s Unknown Daguerreotypist.” New England Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 4, December 1999, pages 594-601.

Polly Longsworth, The World of Emily Dickinson. W. W. Norton, 1990, pages 40-41 and 124-25.

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About the hoax photographs of Dickinson published in Richard Sewall’s The Life of Emily Dickinson and Alfred Habegger’s My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson

Jane Langton, Emily Dickinson Is Dead. Penguin, 1984, frontispiece and pages 243-47.

Joe Nickell, “A Likeness of Emily? The Investigation of a Questioned Photograph.” Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, vol. 5, no. 2, November-December 1993, pages 1-4. http://www.emilydickinson.org/sites/default/files/JoeNic kell.pdf

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George Gleason, “Is It Really Emily Dickinson?” The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 18, no. 2, 2009, pages 1-20. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/364809