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Dear Nicéphore Niépce,
Seeing the daguerreotype has clearly not left you unmoved. What affected you the most: seeing the image, or the feeling that you apparently have to share your name as the inventor of photography with the person depicted, Daguerre?
When I imagine an inventor, I see an inspired person, obsessed by his ideas, who at a certain moment gets a brilliant brainwave. Do you find that naive? Was Louis Daguerre indeed such a figure, a true genius? He could just have well have been an arrogant scientist bent on fame and gain.
Nowadays we can only speculate about the ‘invention’ of photography, even though we probably have a better overview of its history than you. I know, for example, that many different discoveries led to its creation.
The principle of the camera obscura was already employed in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The sensitivity to light of certain silver solutions was discovered in the first half of the eighteenth century and the fixative effect of ammonia fifty years later. Various chemists did research into the latent image and substances that accelerated or inhibited development.
In short, all the ingredients for the first photograph were present for a long time. There is every reason to wonder why photography was not invented earlier. Looked at in this light, however: the experiments that had been done were only adjuncts of research into phenomena other than photography. People were not actually looking for a photographic process.
That’s quite logical - how can one imagine the importance of a photographic process without knowing what a photograph is anyway? This would have required great imaginative powers. And, not least of all, knowledge and independence. Your merits are clear to me: you possessed these qualities, otherwise we would not now have that grainy image of the view from your window that you succeeded in capturing on a tin plate. That makes you an inventor.
The more I think about the daguerreotype, the smaller seems to be Daguerre’s part in the invention of photography. In addition, there is the rumour that he made his discovery by chance - by leaving a number of silver plates in a cupboard with chemical substances.
When it became clear that W.H. Fox Talbot in the United Kingdom was also working on a process and had already patented it, France pushed Louis Daguerre forward as the inventor of photography. Photography had to be France’s ‘gift to the world’. Daguerre had to count as the brilliant Frenchman who was ahead of the English. It was a race with photography as the stake.
Did he not work with you, shortly before you died? We can only guess what Daguerre owes to you. So it must have been indeed frustrating that he became such a celebrated man. The same law goes for inventors as for photographers: serendipity. To what extend can you manage to control a concurrence of random coincidences? I look forward to your ideas about this.
Best wishes,
Nickel van Duijvenboden
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