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Dear Nicéphore,
I would like to return to the central question in my previous letter: how can one imagine something whose existence he is unaware of? This question applies doubly to you. Firstly you have invented a medium that shows us what we cannot imagine. Secondly it is impossible to explain to you, of all people, how photography developed.
How old would you now be in fact, 241? The impossible nature of our correspondence causes problems. The place occupied by the daguerreotype in the development of photography is difficult to describe to someone who already died in 1833. I will have to appeal to your imagination. As I already indicated in my previous letter, I am confident that you are more than capable of this.
It does seem as though everyone in the nineteenth century thought that the new medium would replace painting. After all, it had to cede one of its essential functions - representation - to photography. At the same time this gave painting the freedom to no longer have to be an ‘imitation of nature’. It could finally develop its own language.
Painting did not therefore cease to exist - on the contrary. The one medium never comes in the place of the other. At most they overlap one another, and continue to exist in tandem. The bicycle did not push aside walking, nor has the automobile made the bicycle superfluous. Here’s where photography comes in good stead. Enclosed you will find two photographs, the Benz Vélo from 1894 and the Ford Model T from 1908.
The automobile was literally a self-propelling carriage. A luxury carriage, to be sure. Not only did it look luxurious, as Benz’s automobile was, but it was also an unaccustomed luxury to have yourself carried by such a machine. Not everyone could permit themselves that. The automobile was something that belonged to the elite, the hat wearers, the rest could only look on admiringly. The daguerreotype was the same: a luxury vehicle that only conveyed the well-to-do and cultivated on its silver bearer.
The daguerreotype made a promise that still had to be redeemed by other media: that a medium had been created that everyone could use and that could reproduce everything. In theory that was indeed possible, but in practice the daguerreotype was a cumbersome and expensive vehicle. As happens with inventions, it did open up the way to a wave of revolutionary media. Following on the daguerreotype, people started to record nature on paper, on glass, on cheap tin. Its promise was only redeemed when it was overtaken on all sides by other processes - in speed, in ease, in cost savings. But not in beauty.
With the automobile this revolution was called the Ford Model T. It was the first automobile to be produced and driven on a large scale. And, more importantly, it no longer looked like anything else. The automobile had become a thing in itself. Just as photography after the daguerreotype started to look less and less like painting, and gained a place of its own in the media and in the arts. Photography only began in fact after the daguerreotype. The daguerreotype was an interim medium which stood at the cradle, it is true, but mainly in the shadow of a much greater revolution: visual culture.
Greetings,
Nickel van Duijvenboden
The launch lancering of the T-Ford in Australia, 1915 | Photographer unknown | State Library of Victoria, Melbourne
Benz Vélo in the midst of a crowd of interested people, 1896 | Photographer unknown
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