title: Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M. Daguerre
author:  Stephen C. Pinson 
description: <div><div>&ldquo;The breadth and scope of Pinson&rsquo;s scholarship, as well as the extraordinary range of research undertaken, is deeply impressive. By setting Daguerre&rsquo;s work as a painter and designer in the Parisian theatre and demonstrating how this led to his central involvement with the Diorama, Pinson describes a visual sensibility and culture that is normally overlooked by photographic historians. This book successfully erodes the mythology surrounding Daguerre and Talbot that has been the mainstay of popular photographic history and for the first time draws the two men closer together in awareness, ambition, and achievement than has previously been acknowledged. <i>Speculating Daguerre</i> is an entirely original, informative, and valuable contribution to the history of photography, where it will appeal to a wide variety of audiences.&rdquo;</div></div> (Roger Taylor, De Montfort University, Leicester)<br /><br /><div>&#8220;With clarity, concision, and verve, Stephen Pinson has told the fascinating story of Louis Jacques Mand&#233; Daguerre&#8212;artist, illustrator, inventor of photography, and showman extraordinaire. By situating Daguerre&#8217;s invention of the daguerreotype within the broader tradition of the speculative arts, Pinson significantly revises our understanding of both the origins of photography and the rich visual culture of nineteenth-century France.&#8221;<br><br></div> (Sarah Greenough, Senior Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Art)<br /><br /><div>&ldquo;<i>Speculating Daguerre</i> is exceptional&mdash;there is simply nothing like it in the literature of photography or of nineteenth-century French art history. It is not a biography of Daguerre, but rather a detailed examination of his artistic output, of his endlessly inventive methods, of his hunger for status, recognition, and monetary success, all set into the context of the crosscurrents of art theory and art criticism of the time. Pinson&rsquo;s treatment of the daguerreotype calls into question the historian&rsquo;s division of painting from early photography and will most certainly force a reexamination of that separation by media theorists and historians and critics of visual culture. A stunning, convincing, and entirely novel examination of Daguerre&rsquo;s work as an artist and inventor.&rdquo;<br><br></div> (Joel Snyder, University of Chicago)<br /><br /><div>&ldquo;Stephen C. Pinson&rsquo;s meticulous, sumptuous book helps us appreciate the diversity and fragility of Daguerre&rsquo;s manifold achievements.&rdquo;</div> (<i>Literary Review</i>)<br /><br /><div>&ldquo;Pinson offers a new, insightful perspective on the origins of photography. In this extensively researched catalogue, the author argues that Daguerre&rsquo;s place in the history of photography has eclipsed his contribution to the speculative arts in the 19th century. . . . Using a wealth of original sources, Pinson shows how Daguerre&rsquo;s inventions in reproducing light effects in the popuar and visual arts contributed to the development of photography.&rdquo;</div> (<i>Choice</i>)<br /><br /><div>&#160;&ldquo;<i>Speculating Daguerre</i> . . . for the first time explores in depth the relationship between Daguerre&rsquo;s career as an artist and a businessman, and his scientific investigations. . . . Richly researched and densely written, [Pinson] demonstrates that Daguerre was primarily concerned with being seen and accepted as an artist.&rdquo;</div> (<i>Washington Print Club Quarterly</i>)<br /><br /><div>&#160;&ldquo;Stephen Pinson approaches his subject with the expert touch of a curator handling an eponymous Daguerrotype plate, tilting the image of Daguerre from one of milky opaqueness to one of sudden, sharply defined relief. <i>Speculating Daguerre</i> is a remarkable book rooted in a decade of exhaustive research. . . . [It] transcends conjecture to provide an authoritative and essential new addition to the literature of early photography and emerge as the key contemporary reference to the work of Daguerre.&rdquo;</div> (<i>Royal Photographic Society Journal</i>)<br /><br /><div>&#160;&ldquo;Pinson provides a unified and compelling reading of a career that has too often been reduced to a succession of unconnected, if not incomprehensible, failures and triumphs. This result is obtained by means of serious archival research; a rich contextualization of the man and the artist via Daguerre&rsquo;s visual, commercial, and political culture; and sensitivity to Daguerre&rsquo;s complex artistic aspirations. The reinterpretation is welcome in that it substantiates the diffuse perception of Daguerre as an &lsquo;American in Paris.&rsquo;&rdquo;</div> (<i>caa reviews</i>)<br /><br /><div>&#160;&ldquo;The rigorously researched and elegantly produced project by New York Public Library curator of photography, Stephen Pinson, attempts nothing less than a complete reexamination and rehabilitation of Daguerre&rsquo;s expansive contributions to the visual arts.&rdquo;</div> (<i>Early Popular Visual Culture</i>)<br /><br /><div>&#8220;The book&#8217;s strength lies in Pinson&#8217;s manipulation of a certain backward-looking perspective. He resists Daguerre&#8217;s career to a pre-chapter to photography, even while profiting from the medium&#8217;s inescapable pull. After all, the study&#8217;s ultimate appeal depends on the fact that most readers will only find Daguerre&#8217;s painting and set designs interesting because he subsequently invented photography. Over 150 black-and-white figures, thirty-six color plates, and extensive annexes, which include the most complete catalog of Daguerre&#8217;s work, make <i>Speculating Daguerre</i> as beautiful as it is excellent. It is highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of image-making or the problem of balancing the past&#8217;s complexity with the interests and arguments that shape present views of it.&#8221;<br></div> (<i>Technology and Culture</i>)
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  Published 2012 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books
  
  False Covenant. Copyright © 2012 by Ari Marmell. All rights reserved. No part
  of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
  transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical,
  photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a
  website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case
  of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
  
  Cover illustration © Jason Chan  
  Cover design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht
  
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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
  
  Marmell, Ari.
  
  False covenant : a Widdershins adventure / by Ari Marmell.
  
  p. cm.
  
  Summary: Davillon's economy has suffered in the half-