Early French Daguerreotypes or time traveling mirrors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art...

Finally managed to cross the park on a weekend again. It was really late, getting dark almost, there was snow, rain, there were heavy, wet jackets, layers. Gloves. Slowly soaked through, finally very wet shoes. It is great when nature takes over in such a man made environment like Manhattan. "Take this, tiny New Yorkers!"

Now imagine the Met on a Sunday evening like this. Packed, soaked masses pretending they to wait for a train, perhaps? Heavy, wet jackets, layers, inspected bags, lines, lines, people, people, screams, calls, amplified whispers... suggested price... real price... second floor... turn left, dodge tourists, sneak a peak at some excellent photography from the collection... turn left again... not too early... left again... enter...
quiet. dark. intimate little gallery... soft voices...
Let's enter: The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839–1855 is a selection of 175 images so revolutionary... the ability of some to take the breath away still holds, holds a hundred an fifty years later, in the age when images often do not make ever make it to become real world objects.
What could possibly be so special about often tiny little metallic images, barely visible from some angles, somehow fragile looking and often scratched, strange, almost holographic?...
Dawn of photography. What could one expect here? Portraits of those wealthy enough to have a picture taken, not wealthy enough to have their faces painted? Humans, long gone, turned into strangely still black and silvery metal pieces, their heads supported by their hands or invisible metal braces? Blurry children who did not manage to sit still long enough to actually burn their image in to the metal plates?... Images of Paris? The French countryside?... The colonies.
The first important realization in the exhibition is probably that some of the aspects of the technology on view here appear superior to what we are used to seeing every day. We are now somehow trained to accept a world in which images are turned into data, they are compressed, decompressed, animated, moved quickly across our ever changing liquid cristal screens. Wild colors and sounds somehow distract us from the emptiness often found between "keyframes".
So the very first amazing discovery one must make in the intimate exhibition is just the superior resolution of Daguerreotypes. Yes there are images portraying Paris in something that can be probably best described as no color... yet the images we see are such perfectly detailed reflections of the city, each little window appears so beyond what one might actually even see in real life, that the effect is more of a beyond reality experience. The paris shown here is not some funnily animated movie. It is also not a highly saturated and beautified impression of light, collected on a large canvas... no this is a supreme reflection, a microchip like precision. This 1850's paris looks true to itself.
We realise that all objects on the Daguerreotypes are reversed, as a camera records a mirror image of the subject it is pointed at... today's cameras follow the same principle except that the reversed image they record, the negative is later transfered, often onto a paper surface and usually enlarged. The photographs we usually hold in our hands are objects that were touched by light that passed through a negative made with the help of reflected light that was actually visible at the scene. (I do not even want to think what we are looking at with digital photography... oh and polaroids are a completely different story...)
What makes these Daguerreotypes such powerfully magical objects is the fact that they are the ones that actually were present when whatever we see on them today happened in front of the camera they were mounted in. There is no transfer process, there is no copy. The objects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art right now are time travelers, unique pieces, real witnesses, they are mirrors with the ability to remember one single reflection.
Each and every person portrayed in the Daguerreotypes presented at the Met, did not really look the way we see them in these pieces... but when they looked at these images, they must have been much closer to them than even our own photographs today... all of these pieces are mirror images of the sitters.
We somehow learn to be more familiar with our own mirror image than with photographs of ourselves, don't we?
Combine these two factors, the breathtaking precision and the idea that we are looking at unique, slow-mirrors (as in slow glass) and now you can almost imagine the rooms of the Daguerreotypie exhibition fill with the memories of those reflected here. People, objects, locations... what if they reappeared to face their own reflections... (just a thought.)
And those reflected are not what one would expect.
One small image depicts an open-mouthed man...
His teeth look very used, covered with plaque...
Not far from here, a parent, slightly blurry, next to the bed of his hauntingly sharply exposed passed away child. Right next to it in another post mortem portrait, a sister perhaps, she is even more moved... the dead child in this frame appears even more in focus. (This image is not part of the exhibition but a good illustration of the mood...)
Then there is an image of a painting... a soft beautiful body, the frame of the image is strangely cropped. The painting depicted appears to be painted by Ingres. In the upper portion of the image, a very out of focus recording of a tiny fragment of another Ingres... This one needs a bit of explanation. We learn that the painting who's image has burned itself into the plate here, is a lost one, portraying Ingres' first wife Madeleine... the Daguerreotype was taken long after she was gone. Ingres' second wife, Delphine, who never posed for him nude, urged the artist to destroy the painting... and he did... yet not without asking a Daguerreotypist to record his memory of his first wife on a silver covered copper plate.
The image was apparently discovered, hidden, in a drawer used by Ingres, at the Musée Ingres in Montauban, France.
It is truly fascinating to see how a new technology was quickly applied by many very differently thinking minds. Some of the thoughts turned to images might appear somehow dated and part of the 19th century thinking, but many of the metallic images feel like timeless masterpieces. (Or maybe the hand of time just happens to have aligned the current aesthetic perception with the one of the makers of some of the presented daguerreotypes.) Images of designer samples, or a very incredible arrangement of flowers reminded me of contemporary photography (and maybe how some of it would like to achieve the effect of what I was looking at here.) In a room containing some softly pornographic daguerreotypes, happen to be some interesting non related images. (Not that the stereoscopic erotica from the 19th century were not interesting, of course.)
One of the most exciting pieces in the exhibition might be a rather sweet little portrait of a panting dog taken by Louis-Auguste Bisson for his surrogate sister, Rosa Bonheur. Though the image is embedded in a rather cute, dog house shaped frame, the viewer is very much aware that this very sharp image must have been incredibly difficult to record. The animal appears quite perfectly in focus. How did the maker of this daguerreotype manage to keep even the tongue of the seemingly very happy dog so still?... The exposure times for early daguerreotypes were around 15 minutes... and even after subsequent technological improvements, the exposure times were still in the range of a minute... Could Bisson have used some special trick to obtain the desired effect? Maybe the amount of light was somehow increased to a level where a shorter exposure was possible?... Still... (And no, the dog was not a Weimaraner.)
The last room of the exhibition also contained several gems. Images of death masks, or rather plaster copies of heads of several Arfican tribesmen. Images interesting because of the several layers of creation that were at play here...
Images had been recorded of sculptures which had been recorded, after lives... which had not quite been recorded, taken from an environment barely understood...
Floating memories of heads. Detached from their bodies. No sign of anything that could possibly date them... Series... Even series of these must have appeared more compact and easier to store than the plaster heads, than the real heads, than the ideas of the people to whom these heads belonged?
Still, the results shown here were also hauntingly beautiful...
One of the series actually reminded me of the more current Chuck Close work... which happens to be evolving in the same medium... only very different... perhaps?... Well, different, yes...
And when I looked at some of the images, I wondered if Chuck Close was actually reaching back to an old technique, or if the technique of daguerreotype just waited for a little while, to be rediscovered by somebody who would understand that the fast things are not always the more interesting ones.
To be rediscovered by somebody who understands the energy magic... and the ability to not stop time, but to travel through it...
If I was not quite sure why Close would use daguerreotypes for some of his recent work before I saw the exhibition... after seeing it... it was more than a most logical step... in the right direction...
hmm...

Outside, louder voices, an open gallery, light, sounds, voices, brilliant paintings, turn right, turn right, dodge the giftshop, layers, wet jackets, heavy. Soaked masses, packed. The Met on a Sunday evening...

Outside of the museum were New Yorkers, pushed towards the building by rain. It was time to return home, in soaked shoes, gloves, layers, heavy wet jackets, through the melted snow, the lakes of water. It was really late... and yet it was possible to again cross the park...
I am certainly not getting enough sleep these days...