Preserving Photography's Past: Daguerreotypes at Harvard
– Melissa Banta and Robin McElheny
Among the millions of photographic images amassed by Harvard's libraries, museums, archives, and academic departments are remarkable collections of the first popular photographic medium: the daguerreotype. With the daguerreotype process, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and his partner Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre succeeded in realizing a centuries-old dream of capturing a natural scene on a fixed surface. The process consisted of treating a silver-coated copper plate with light sensitive chemicals and exposing it in a camera, which resulted in an exquisitely detailed image, extraordinary in its lustrous quality and tonal range.
In 1994, the Harvard University Library Preservation Center conducted a survey to assess the condition of the daguerreotypes, and identified approximately 450 tucked away in boxes or vaults, or among manuscript collections at thirteen repositories; then in 1995, the Houghton Library acquired 3,301 daguerreotypes from the private collection of Harrison Horblit. Together these represent a daguerreotype collection of international significance that illustrates pioneering uses of early photography as a tool of scientific research, teaching, and artistic expression in mid-nineteenth-century America. The Harvard collections include some of the earliest photographs of the moon, taken at the Harvard College Observatory; images of a re-creation of the first operation using ether, taken at the Massachusetts General Hospital; and rare portraits of African-born slaves, commissioned by naturalist Louis Agassiz for his studies in racial analysis.
Other portraits, of which there are many, include likenesses of Henry James, Dorothea Lynde Dix, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Horatio Alger, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Jenny Lind. The University houses one of the earliest known photographic class albums, the Harvard Class of 1852, taken by John Adams Whipple. In the Fogg Museum reside two previously unpublished images, one of James McNeill Whistler, age fifteen, presenting a rare glimpse of the artist in his youth, and another of his brother William, two years younger.
Because they are produced by a direct-positive process, daguerreotypes have no accompanying negatives from which to create duplicate prints, thereby lending an urgency to the preservation of Harvard's collections. In addition, researchers have had no tools with which to comprehensively search the University's daguerreotypes. In 1995, the National Historical Publications and records Commission awarded a grant of $52,834 to the Harvard University Library to preserve and improve access to these unique collections. The grant allowed the Library to preserve selected daguerreotypes, undertake a condition survey of Houghton's newly acquired Horbilt collection, and re-house all daguerreotypes in archival enclosures. Project staff worked with curators to create and update existing collection-level bibliographic records in HOLLIS, the University Library database, as well as in the national bibliographic databases. Selected images were reformatted on 35mm continuous-tone microfilm, copies of which will be distributed to each of the thirteen participating repositories. The microfilm will be available to researchers elsewhere through interlibrary loan. These same images have been reformatted as 35mm color slides from which a CD-ROM will be produced for use by the individual repositories.