Author Description

On 7 January 1839, during a session of the Academy of Sciences in Paris, the physicist and politician Francois Arago presented a new process to reproduce images, using mechanical and chemical means without any manual intervention in a dark room. This procedure became known as the daguerreotype and marked the official birth of photography. Louis Daguerre's invention, in which a single image is exposed directly onto a mirror-polished copper plate coated with silver halide particles, definitively altered the way we look at the world and the representations we make of it, both artistic and scientific. This collection of French daguerreotypes drawn from the Musee d'Orsay emphasizes the particular aesthetic of these unique photographs, which are at once positive and negative. The development and rapid, but ephemeral, spread of Daguerre's invention in France are illustrated by the variety of subjects and the depth and quality of the collection the Museum has built up over the last few years.