Hermitage Days 2011
The Age of Daguerreotype. Early Russian Photography

On 8 December 2011, the State Hermitage Museum welcome an exhibit entitled The Age of Daguerreotype. Early Russian Photography. This exhibition includes two daguerreotypes from the 1840’s-1850’s from the collections of the State Hermitage Museum, the Museum of the Russian Literature Institute of the Russian Academy of Science and the Library of the Russian Academy of Arts.

Among the first examples of daguerreotype in Russia, sent from Paris by Daguerre, were exhibited at the Academy of Arts in autumn of 1839. The abundant, overcrowded items in these still lives astonished viewers. The use of a traditional subject did not turn out to be a successful attempt to compete with “great art.” The third daguerreotype, a view of Paris, demonstrated photography’s ability to capture the smallest details of the world. Daguerreotype was acknowledged as having useful practical and scientific applications, but could not gain recognition as one of the “fine arts”.

After Daguerre announced his discovery in 1839, it became possible to speak of the “great daguerreotype fever,” which no one escaped. In Moscow and Saint Petersburg, crowds of people gathered in front of the display cases of art stores in the hopes of seeing pictures created with the light of the sun. The devotees of this new technological achievement, busily occupying themselves by experimenting with daguerreotype plates, were not deterred by the expensive materials, or by their rarity in Russia. The sales of cameras and plates were sold by intermediaries, usually optometrists; Schedel in Saint Petersburg and the Beckers brothers in Moscow. In October of 1839, Beckers placed daguerreotype views of Moscow in his store’s display case, having put their production on firm commercial basis.

By the mid 1840s, the term daguerreotype could claim to be the most important phenomenon in public life, and was sometimes used as a synonym for “reality”, “naturism” or “physiology”.

Improvements to the daguerreotype process were proceeding by leaps and bounds. In 1839-1840, important inventions made it possible to reduce exposure time to a few seconds; the first high-aperture devices with multiple lenses appeared, and then an even more powerful light-sensitive optical system. Technical improvements (reducing exposure time, the invention of portrait lenses, the discovery of a method for strengthening the image via gold plating) made in various parts of the world during the first years of daguerreotype’s existence, made it possible to make a photographic portrait of a person. The last two decades of the existence of this type of photography become the age of photographic portraiture.

A Davinion’s studio enjoyed great popularity in Petersburg, where portraits of the Decembrists S.G. Volkonskiy, I.V. Podzhio, N.A. Panov and P.A. Muhanov were made, among others.

The peak of daguerreotype portraiture also includes the work of I. Veninger, who aspired to express certain spiritual conditions in his art; melancholy reflection and dreaminess. His subject’s poses also emphasized their aristocratic status and elegance. The photographer often used a dark background and brightly illuminated his subjects faces, which made shadows almost disappear and the contours of faces deflated, and yet became luminous.

The birth of daguerreotype coincided with such concepts as the “hero of our time” and the “contemporary person” beginning to influence public life in Russia. It is precisely daguerreotype that was able to capture these “heroes,” including Nikolai Gogol and Karl Bryullov; the former in a group shot, taken in 1845 in Rome in the workshop of F. Perrault and the later in two daguerreotypes by unknown photographers, along with his works. It was this very daguerreotype that I.E. Repin used for his painting “Gogol burns the second volume of “Dead Souls.”

The triumph of daguerreotype came in 1850, when a portrait of F.P. Tolstoy by S.K. Zaryanko (State Russian Museum) was displayed at an exhibit at the Academy of Arts, where it inspired admiration of the aesthetic potential of daguerreotype among the people of the time and launched a new movement of painting in the mid 19th century, Naturalism.

In 1850, daguerreotype portraiture was still in higher demand than paper printouts, but it fell into neglect soon after. Sergey Levitzkiy, the last significant master of daguerreotype, is represented at the exhibit by complementary portraits, diverse in their composition and plastic solution. Levitzkiy’s daguerreotypes are luminous, characterized by distinctly elaborated details and the highly emphasized sharpness of the images. The daguerreotypes depicting the Pashkovs (a mother and daughters) are illustrative. Not counting stereodaguerreotypes, this work is the latest of those represented at the exhibit, and, to some extent, demonstrates the potential the daguerreotype received before its disappearance.

The exhibit entitled The Age of Daguerreotype. Early Russian Photography is the first exhibit at the Hermitage to explore such an interesting and ultimately vanished phenomenon as daguerreotype, as well as the stages of its development, so widely and deeply.

The curator of this exhibit is Natalya Yurievna Avetyan, academic associate and custodian of the photography collection of the Photography Fund of the Department of Russian Culture of the State Hermitage. An illustrated scholarly catalogue for this exhibit has been prepared by the State Hermitage Museum’s publishing house.

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Introduction to the exhibit

Natalia Avetyan, curator of the exhibit

Tatiana Petrova

The first visitors

Rarities

At the exhibit

The exhibit in the Picket Hall

The catalogue for the exhibit