Daguerreotype Project

The average photo taken during a family outing last week may not seem like something of much interest to someone living two states away. However keep those photos in a safe place for roughly two or three hundred years and those same photos may tell a story, activate imaginations, and their intrinsic value escalates. Why is this so? It is because humans are curious about the past and are always searching for a connection to it so they may learn a bit more about their own lives.

Our own Daguerreotype projects started with examinations with the ordinary, the macabre, and the lovable Daguerreotypes of the early and mid 19^th century. These images developed on polished silver plates were the first successful system of photography and as with any new technology people wanted a slice of the experience. But what would you photograph? This is where the connection to our own sensibilities comes into play. Many of the people of the 19^th century were getting Daguerreotypes of along many of the same themes that we might today; family, work, and everything in between. We were shown images of deceased children, the last image for a grieving family, miners working the muddied grounds of California looking for Gold, and the family pet.

So how do we or should we use these images in our classrooms? The answer is an unequivocal, yes. These images are a window to the past that a book full of words cannot compete with. For the average student who is connect to as many as three or more electronic devices and who receives much of their information visually a simple Daguerreotype is a connection they can make. They understand a photo and they can, with some simple instruction, analyze these photos and pull out stories of peoples lives long gone and thus creating a student historian rather than a data return specialist. What an amazing tool for teaching!

Citation: American Memory Collection; Digital ID: cph 3d02055 Source: b&w film copy neg. post-1992