Daguerreotypes at Harvard
“Introduced by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre in 1839, the daguerreotype was the first publicly announced photographic process. This digital collection provides access to over 3,500 daguerreotypes in libraries, museums, and archives across Harvard.“
For the project, I selected a set of 50 portraits of women between the years 1840-60 from this collection. The set was a good mix of women who were famous, mostly opera singers and stage actors at the time and some women of the aristocracy who remained as titles and names, but no other information.
Upon looking at the set, the similarities are deceptively simple. They are all women of a certain social standing, they all wear similar fashions and hairstyles and most of these photographs are enclosed within golden frames.
I noticed that the women, albeit elegantly, seemed to be photographed in a monotony of convention, dignity, and propriety. It spoke nothing of their individual stories, their adventures, or careers.
I started to make sense of the set by reorganizing and sorting the photographs in various ways: 1. by the frames used.
2. By separating the features.
3. The direction of sitting (left/ right) and highlighting the backgrounds
4. I became particularly interested in the placement of their hands. I wondered what these carefully choreographed placements said about the time or the women. Were they confident? Were they hesitant? Were they feigning a delicate temperament as directed by the photographer?
I started to crop out the hands and zooming into them.
Combining images from about 20-25 of them, I made a new catalogue of just the hands in full-bleed spreads.