Technology and Culture

After a disappointing career as a painter and set designer of no real talent, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre partnered with Nicéphore Niépce to explore the commercialization of heliography, Niépce’s recent invention. Niépce died in 1833, and in 1839, Daguerre claimed the invention of photography as his own, thus securing a generous state pension on which he retired comfortably. Or so goes the narrative against which Speculating Daguerre argues. Stephen Pinson, art historian and curator of photography at the New York Public Library, mobilizes meticulous research in archival and printed sources and visual analysis of Daguerre’s extant works to situate him and his oeuvre (drawings, pastels, dessins-fumées, paintings on canvas and glass, spectacular stage sets, the diorama, and daguerreotypes) within the context of early-nineteenth-century visual culture.

Speculating Daguerre provides a corrective to a century and a half of scholarly and popular analysis that has either debated Daguerre’s role as the “inventor” of photography or his status as an artist, in both cases reading his work and career backward through the lens of the subsequent history of the medium. Historians of technology will find echoes of their own struggles against technological determinism in Pinson’s vivid portrait of the aesthetic, economic, and political contexts that Daguerre navigated. Daguerre emerges here as a “determined, highly productive, resilient, and politically savvy artist,” as well as an “ambitious and commercially minded” businessman (p. 94). His public career spanned the worlds of theater, painting, and publishing from 1804, when he apprenticed as a set painter at the Opéra, until his death in 1851. These dates also bound some of the most tumultuous decades in French history, and Daguerre remarkably cultivated official favor under six different political regimes. Moreover, he both catered to the traditional art world, by submitting work to the Salon, France’s state-run painting exhibition, and innovated it, by creating the diorama, an actor-less public theater where tricks of light brought landscapes and interior views to life.

Pinson analyzes the range of Daguerre’s career as part of a broad nineteenth-century culture of “speculation” and its implications for art and economics. Daguerre the set designer capitalized on increasing economic speculation in the arts that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. Indeed, like many artistic projects of its time, the diorama operated not under royal or aristocratic patronage, but rather as a limited stock venture. There, Daguerre the artist sold a type of theatrical spectacle that developed out of a lifelong commitment to a now-obsolete definition of speculation: [End Page 977] close observation of the natural world. This meaning gives Daguerre’s career the throughline that it lacks without photography’s teleology. The content and form of Daguerre’s forays into various media demonstrate an abiding interest in rendering the “effects”—color, tone, and gradation—of natural light as observed through optical devices. These tools, including the camera lucida, the camera obscura, and the Claude mirror, shaped contemporary expectations of landscape. By showing how Daguerre used them, Pinson reinterprets the daguerreotype not as a transcription of the real, but as a permanent record of these mediated effects. At the same time, daguerreotyping made images magically appear, which was another nineteenth-century meaning of speculation. A short and gripping narrative chapter explains how the technology also represented Daguerre the businessman’s last speculatory gamble to secure government patronage. To conclude, Pinson offers his own speculations about Daguerre’s relationship to the mechanical reproduction of images, the narrative development into which over a century of photographic history has tried to cram the unique, irreproducible daguerreotype.

The book’s strength lies in Pinson’s manipulation of a certain backward-looking perspective. He resists reducing Daguerre’s career to a pre-chapter to photography, even while profiting from the medium’s inescapable pull. After all, the study’s ultimate appeal depends on the...