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Girl with a Butterfly, 30 April 1840. Print from etched daguerreotype, 99 x 72 mm (image). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. bi-b-2644-2.
Source publication
Following Alfred Donné in Paris, the Austrian Joseph Berres was the second person in history to convert unique daguerreotypes into intaglio printing plates by etching them in acid and then printing them in ink on paper. Berres’s experiments culminated in the booklet Phototyp nach der Erfindung des Professors Berres in Wien (1840), which is consider...
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Citations
Little has been published about reproductive daguerreotypes, a genre of photographic still life in which another picture – a drawing, an engraving, a lithograph, a painting, a printed text – is the sole referent. However, as this essay demonstrates, a study of reproductive daguerreotypes is a study of daguerreotypy itself – of its capacities and limitations as a medium, of its major figures and its diversity of commercial applications, of its many possible meanings, functions and related viewing practices. But it is also an opportunity to reflect on the place of such daguerreotypes in the larger story concerning the photographic reproduction of artworks. Reproductive daguerreotypes are distinctive in that they copy an artwork exactly but unfaithfully: they often laterally reverse the image even while rendering it small, monochrome, precious, shiny, evanescent, mobile. Most striking is the way such daguerreotypes partake of the logic of reproducibility without necessarily participating in the processes of mass production normally associated with it: as unique copies, they offer replication without multiplicity. In so doing, they complicate the orthodox account of this process promulgated by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s and repeated so many times since.
A physico‐chemical elucidation of the first photographic technology that allowed manifold reproduction is presented. An etched daguerreotype manufactured around 1840 in Vienna, preserved by the Technisches Museum Wien, served as a case study. Surface analysis showed that the photographic process involved the formation of colloidal Ag nanoparticles with sizes of 30–120 nm with shell layers consisting of Ag2O, Ag2S, and some AgCl. This breakthrough photographic technique provided a hitherto unachieved high sensitivity because of various halogenide mixtures without the use of Hg. The image development consisted of the reduction of the Ag halides by H2SO3 created by the hydrolysis of S2Cl2 leading to the formation of Ag nanoparticles adjacent to the Ag nuclei of the latent image. The fixing of the image was performed either by KCN or by Na2S2O3. The investigated plate exhibits etched areas with Ag2O conversion layers and no Cl or S. The gum arabic use for etching preferentially wetted the exposed Ag nanoparticle regions so that unexposed areas could be etched by HNO3.
