(Clicking on most images that follow will show a screen size enlargement)



The most haunting daguerreotypes are those of
people FACING death.

SIXTH PLATE DAGUERREOTYPE. Dying woman with Invalid's Bell. Artist unknown c1852.


(Click on the image to view further details)
 Too weak to sit or stand, this young woman simultaneously faces the specter of imminent death, and the immortal eye of the camera. Timelessly insuring this daguerreotype's utter poignancy, an invalid's bell rests upon the night stand.


The limp and lifeless pup held in this child's lap is of course, not in the same league as human death. Yet, the child's face vividly expresses a degree of pain known to all. Perhaps childhood's greatest burden is a growing realization that the human condition exacts eventual loss of everything we love.

This little boy was a relatively inexperienced player amid life's bereavement. Loss of his friend was only a first step along the gauntlet of human experience. His youth and innocence in no way lessen the fresh, open pain of his grieving eyes.
SIXTH PLATE DAGUERREOTYPE. Little boy holding dead puppy propped in his lap. Artist unknown c1848.


(Click on the image to view further details)


An adult's eyes betray the same pain tempered only by familial bred weariness.

SIXTH PLATE DAGUERREOTYPE. Young father holding his dead child. His wife gazes on, possibly still weak or ill from childbirth. Artist unknown c1848.


(Click on the image to view further details)
The visual intimacy in this daguerreotype invades a death-crushed world of hope and love, and transforms the pain into a universality of human loss.


This young girl has lost a brother she loved. We gaze with her eyes into death's white shroud, and grapple with her feelings of nameless pain and terror. Such images usually plunge into bottomless depths of pathos.
This daguerreotype possibly allows something more.
SIXTH PLATE DAGUERREOTYPE (detail). Young girl posed behind her dead brother. Artist unknown c1850.

The powerful division of this daguerreian plate between light and dark, and the haunting arrangement of the figures, express rich symbolism:

The living child, clothed in white smock of innocence, actually stands shrouded within darkness: A dark symbol of mental turmoil and despair--the "blackness of darkness" pervading human suffering.

Her arms act as serpentine connections between this dark world of humanity and the white world of death.

The dead child, clothed in dark funereal garb, actually floats upon whiteness: A white symbol of the silent stillness of death--Herman Melville's "colorless, all color, atheistic annihilation" within "heartless voids and immensities of the universe."

As defined by Aristotle, great art occasionally sculpts heights of tragedy from the incessant flow of human pathos. Such art communicates a moment of "time and space suspended . . . a sensation of unspeakable beauty." Somewhere in mid-19th century America, an unknown artist preserved his gift of genius in the symbolism and daguerreian-rich tonal beauty of this image.




FINIS




BACK to page 1

BACK to page 2

BACK TO PHOTOGRAPHY ESSAYS INDEX

BACK TO HOMEPAGE
Text and digital images copyright (1997). All rights reserved. Copying or redistribution in any manner is prohibited. Any public or commercial use of these materials without prior written permission is a violation of copyright law.