Louis Daguerre
Images from the Nineteenth Century arrive before our eyes in many forms, but one of the most common is a silvery, mirror-like form of early photograph: this forerunner of the modern film camera was the brainchild of artist and inventor Louis Daguerre. Born in France in 1787, Daguerre became well-known for his skills as a panoramic painter, and in 1822 he invented the diorama, a version of the panoramic painting that subtly changed appearance in life-like fashion as its illumination changed over time. In 1829, he joined Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in a collaboration to employ Niépce's recently-invented "heliograph" - a primitive form of photography - in the creation of dioramas. After Niépce's death in 1833, Daguerre continued to experiment with ways of refining the photographic process, and in 1839 the daguerrotype was presented to the world. While by today's standards daguerrotypes were primitive and clumsy - exposures for ordinary subjects ranged from a few seconds to a few minutes, and copies could not be made from originals - Daguerre's invention revolutionized the world, and for the next decade was the dominant form of photographic record. Even though other processes eventually displaced the daguerrotype from its lofty perch, Daguerre had nothing to worry about: a pension from the French Government allowed him to live comfortably until his death in 1851.
