Among a collection of daguerreotypes for sale at Christie’s is one made by Samuel F.B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, who briefly ran a portrait studio in New York City.
Among a collection of daguerreotypes for sale at Christie’s is one made by Samuel F.B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, who briefly ran a portrait studio in New York City.
Among a collection of daguerreotypes for sale at Christie’s is one made by Samuel F.B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, who briefly ran a portrait studio in New York City.
Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll look at an image from the early days of photography that was taken by a man usually remembered for something different: inventing the telegraph. We’ll also find out why the speaker of the Assembly wants state lawmakers to get paid even when the state budget is late, as it is this year.
The man in the dim, muddy image isn’t the reason the little portrait could sell for as much as $60,000.
It’s the man who took it — Samuel F.B. Morse, who is mainly remembered as the inventor of the telegraph.
Long before there were camera shops and film, there were daguerreotypes, images made using a photographic process invented in the 1830s by the French artist Louis Daguerre. Morse was an early adopter despite the limitations of daguerreotyping. A single image took minutes to expose. Fraction-of-a-second shutter speeds were unheard-of. So were shutters, buttons to release them and flashbulbs to light dark rooms. The picture was taken by pulling a cap off the lens and putting it back on later.
Still, daguerreotypes caught on in the United States in the 1840s, and portrait studios seemed to be everywhere. “You could walk along Broadway here in New York City, and there were daguerreotype studios where you could go in and have a portrait made and, within a couple of hours, have a portrait you could take home,” said Darius Himes, the head of photographs at Christie’s, which will show the Morse daguerreotype next week and sell it next month.