My Favorite Lecture: Andrew Hershberger
Daguerre's Diorama
"Daguerre's Diorama"
One reason why I love teaching and researching the history of photography so very much is because the beginnings of photography are so insanely interesting! Maybe the most fascinating thing of all (but there's a LOT of competition) is Daguerre's Diorama. While he was inventing photography, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) had already created what Helmut and Alison Gernsheim have called the "ne plus ultra of pictorial illusion." Namely, in the 1820s and 1830s, Daguerre ran his own quasi-theatre called the "Diorama." The Diorama opened in Paris in 1822 in a specially designed building located near the Champs-Elysées. Therein Daguerre and his partners, Charles Marie Bouton (1781-1853) and later Hippolyte Sébron (1801-1879), exhibited their enormous—approximately 15 x 24 yards (!) across—highly illusionistic, and translucent two-sided paintings under intricately controlled lighting conditions. The Diorama became popular enough that Daguerre and Bouton joined in a venture to open a second Diorama theatre in London in 1823. According to extant reviews, the Diorama was a "place of magic and fantasy," an early virtual experience that seemed for many audience members "more beautiful than nature." Because Daguerre created the illusion of motion in his double-sided paintings, not surprisingly the Diorama has sometimes been identified as the beginnings of cinema as well. In this way, it might be possible to understand photography's future in an age of multi-disciplinary practice by examining the multi-talented past of its inventor. Tragically, a fire destroyed Daguerre's Parisian Diorama on March 8, 1839, just two months after he announced the Daguerreotype. Daguerre never returned to painting his full-size dioramas. Even though the London Diorama remained open for 14 more years, and the building still stands today in Regents Park, perhaps the most spellbinding mystery of all is that all of Daguerre's full-size diorama paintings have been lost!
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