Bergeron Studio and Gallery celebrated White
Linen Night with “Daguerreotypes: Photographic Beginnings”
featuring works by E. Jacobs, F. Law, J. Plumbe, Jules Lyon
– oral history provenance, among others. The private
collections of Robert DeBlieux, Donald Schenk and B. Wolf,
include daguerreotype images, stereoview daguerreotypes, a
daguerreotype stereoviewer, cases, and tokens.
The daguerreotype invented by chemist and
artist Louis J.M. Daguerre in 1839, is an image produced directly
onto a highly polished plate of photo sensitized silver and
then exposed with slightly heated mercury fumes, placed under
glass and contained in a velvet-lined folding case. It has
no negative and cannot be reproduced. Exposure times for the
earliest daguerreotypes ranged from three to fifteen minutes,
making the process rather uncomfortable, sitters had the back
of their head held in place by a metal bar and were told not
to smile. Modifications to the sensitization process coupled
with the improvement of photographic lenses soon reduced the
exposure time to less than a minute. However, even a minute
exposure would show movement, which is why landscapes and
candid shots are a rarity. The exhibit does contain one landscape
of a farmhouse. However, the majority are portrait subjects
with one post mortem. A habit of the mid 19th century that
was exemplified in the New Orleans fiction novel “Yellow
Jack” by Josh Russell. While the daguerreotype was not
the first photographic process to be developed, images of
earlier processes tended to fade quickly when exposed again
to light. The daguerreotype photographic process was one of
the first to permanently record and affix an image, and became
the first commercially used photographic process.
The featured collection of Robert DeBlieux
is providing two ambrotype portraits that are attributed to
Jules Lyon (also spelled Lions), a black daguerreian and portrait
painter born in Paris in 1816, who lived and worked in New
Orleans. He is credited as being the first daguerreian in
New Orleans, La., and was listed there, as a painter, as early
as 1837. His varied artistic pursuits ranged from painting,
to lithography and to photography. In 1848, he opened an art
school on Exchange Street and in 1865 became a professor of
drawing at Louisiana College. No daguerreotype has ever been
positively proven to have been created by Lyon, however the
two DeBlieux heirloom ambrotypes (a process that replaced
daguerreotypes) of Mr. & Mrs. Jean Baptist Trizzini attributed
to Lyon are particularly interesting.
Most of the items on display are not for sale.
Offers are being excepted however and a price list is available
for select items.
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