Image for The Scenic Daguerreotype : Romanticism and Early Photography

The Scenic Daguerreotype : Romanticism and Early Photography

See all formats and editions

Too often, photographic historians have given credit to the calotype for establishing our sense and standard of the photographic, when in reality it was the daguerreotype that first taught us how to see photographically, taking us beyond portraiture to a standard for scenic images that is still with us today.

Here is the first study of scenic daguerreotypes from around the world and the largest assemblage of them ever to be presented in book form.

Contending that L. J. M. Daguerre was at the forefront of the romantic revolution, Wood discusses Daguerre's work in the context of John Constable, J.

M. W. Turner, and Caspar David Friedrich. He also draws parallels between early landscape photography, the poetry of William Wordsworth, and William Gilpin's notions of the picturesque, which influenced both travel and the way nineteenth-century men and women began to view the landscape around them.

Wood's selection of more than a hundred images presents the best surviving examples of the scenic daguerreotype.

They include views of the Acropolis, Egypt, and China, of mountains and Alpine scenery, of Pompeii, Venice, and the temples of Rome, of the California Gold Rush and other American scenes, plus daguerreotypes from Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Martinique, and Brazil.

Read More
Available
£49.95
Add Line Customisation
Out of print
Add to List
Product Details
University of Iowa Press
0877455112 / 9780877455110
Hardback
772.12
31/12/1995
United States
232 pages, illustrations
235 x 292 mm, 1089 grams
General (US: Trade)/Professional & Vocational/Undergraduate Learn More