Daguerreotypes are amongst the most mysterious, compelling images of the 19th century. It is not widely known that these were the earliest photographs ever taken. This process, discovered by the French artist and photographer Louis Daguerre in 1839, was to completely revolutionise the nature of visual perception. Similarly to the way in which the invention of movable type was to promote the diffusion of writing, books and newspapers, the invention of photography resulted in the birth of the cinema and our current “selfie culture”. Daguerreotypes were copper plates coated with an amalgam of silver and mercury. These photographs, similar to mirrors with memory, are difficult to observe as the final image appears as positive or negative depending on the angle of reflected light. They were, therefore, unique, one-off photographs that could not be reproduced, as was possible later using the negative positive system. Colouring the plates was an extremely complex process, requiring the flame of a candle to heat the plate on which a very fine power of coloured pigments was applied.
The daguerreotype was to mark the start of research in the field of photography in order to obtain images of superior quality and to overcome the bi-dimensional nature of a flat support. The introduction of coloured stereoscopic images marked another step forward in improving the realistic illusion. Stereoscopy made it possible to observe the photographs obtaining a three-dimensional view: two apparently identical images were placed side by side according to the average intraocular distance of our eyes and were then observed using a specific viewer that made it possible to recompose the double images in a single three-dimensional photograph. Such a refined, sophisticated method was reserved only for particularly significant images. In the midnineteenth century, the upper middle class spent their evenings viewing stereographs with which adults and children could be transported to exotic places or view famous personages. From the time of its invention, the French have always been masters of the daguerreotype process. In the catalogue of the May 17 photography auction, Bolaffi presented a set of precious stereoscopic daguerreotypes attributed to Félix Jacques Antoine Moulin, specialised in female nudes which, by today’s standards would be considered extremely chaste but which were, at that time, condemned as obscene, the secret souvenir of impeccable businessmen returning from the French capital. The daguerreotypes put up for sale by Bolaffi, unearthed in a country house, were concealed in a cigar box to hide these images considered indecent at that time. The six daguerreotypes depicted naked girls portrayed in finely-detailed interiors, decorated with brocade drapery and the inevitable mirror reflecting the soft, rounded figures of the young women in a sensual interplay of reflections. At that time, these nudes, in our eyes genteel, vaguely erotic portraits, were clandestine images for which, in 1851, Moulin was sentenced to a month in jail for producing images that, according to court papers, were “so obscene that even to pronounce the titles . . . would violate public morality”.

BY Silvia Berselli