PHOTOGRAPHY PATERNITY TESTING
19th August - World Photo Day
“From today, painting is dead!” God bless Daguerre and Niépce to have revealed the invention who made anyone able to became artist and to buy a little bit of geniality at the price of a silver paper! On August 19th 1839, Arago announced the invention of the Photography process by Daguerre and Niépce (Isidore, son of Nicéphore the inventor) to the French Academy of Science.
Here the article published on the “Journal des débats politiques et littéraires” the day after the declaration of the daguerreotype process showing all the first doubts of that time.
Would be possible to record the original colours of the nature? Would be possible to take portrait?
“Daguerre already had written an instruction manual that was on sale only a few days after Arago’s presentation. What is almost unbelievable to me is the number of manuals that were printed and sold. In France there were eight editions; in England, three; in Germany, five; in Sweden, one; in Italy, two; and in Spain, two. Twenty-one editions in four months! — plus reproductions of the instructions in condensed form in newspapers and magazines.” (Newhall)
The invention was anticipated on January 6th 1839 on La Gazette de France by Henri Gaucheraud.
“We have much pleasure in announcing an important discovery made by M. Daguerre, the celebrated painter of the Diorama. This discovery seems like a prodigy. It disconcerts all the theories of science in light and optics, and, if borne out, promises to make a revolution in the arts of design. M. Daguerre has discovered a method to fix the images which are represented at the back of a camera obscura; so that these images are not the temporary reflection of the object, but their fixed and durable impress, which may be removed from the presence of those objects like a picture or an engraving.”
Gaucheraud focused immediatly on the limits of the first attempt of daguerrotype, declaring that the “Nature in motion cannot be represented, or at least not without great difficulty, by the process in question. In one of the views of the Boulevards, of which I have spoken, all that was walking or moving does not appear in the design; of two horses in a hackney coach on the stand, one unluckily moved its head during the short operation; the animal is without a head in the design. Trees are very well represented; but their colour, as it seems, hinders the solar rays from producing their image as quickly as that of houses, and other objects of a different colour. This causes a difficulty for landscape, because there is a certain fixed point of perfection for trees, and another for all objects the colours of which are not green. The consequence is, that when the houses are finished, the trees are not, and when the trees are finished, the houses are too much so. Inanimate nature, architecture, are the triumph of the apparatus which M. Daguerre means to call after his own name—Daguerrotype. A dead spider, seen in the solar microscope, is finished with such detail in the design, that you may study its anatomy, with or without a magnifying glass, as if it were nature itself; not a fibre, not a nerve, but you may trace and examine.”
Here the proofs exposed at the French Academy of Science.
On January 7, 1839, members of the French Academy of Sciences were shown the first Daguerre’s tests and the Academy secured the inventor a lifetime pension of 6,000 Francs for the rest of his life, and to give the estate of Niépce 4,000 Francs yearly in exchange for the rights to his process. The process take the name of Daguerre even if it come from the society Niépce-Daguerre, here the base of their contract http://www.niepce-daguerre.com/Base_du_contrat_Niepce-Dag.html Niépce’s discoveries were fundamental for Daguerre as well Daguerre gave important tips to Niépce to improve the heliographic process. Nicéphore Niépce died on 1833 for a stroke and Isidore, his son succeeded to the father. He wasn’t able to develop his father’s discoveries (who created the first camera, for heliography, and with Daguerre the physautotype, image fixed by lavender oil). After the senior Niépce death, Daguerre progressed the invention and named it the “daguerréotype”, after himself.
With the declaration of the invention of the Daguerrotype it has been started the first trial about Photography for more info http://www.niepce-daguerre.com/
Anyway the first announcement of the invention generate another claim, of course with Talbot. For other people the World Photo Day should be considered the 14th March …
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