The Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre Memorial
I have been taking photographs during my lunchtime bike rides and posting them in this blog for over four years now. But it wasn’t until today’s ride that I visited a memorial to a man who contributed to making that possible. During this ride I visited the memorial to Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype, which was the first viable photographic process.
The Daguerre Memorial is located at 7th and F Streets (MAP), across the street from the Verizon Center, in northwest D.C.’s Chinatown neighborhood. It stands on the grounds of the Old Patent Office Building, which is now home to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. The 11-foot tall bronze sculpture, by American artist Jonathan Scott Hartley, was erected in the rotunda of the Arts and Industries Building at the instigation of the Professional Photographers of America, and was unveiled and dedicated on August 15, 1890 during the eleventh annual PPA convention.
In 1897, during a renovation of the building, the memorial was moved outside to the grounds, where it remained for the next 72 years. In the early 1960’s The Kodak Company tried to have the statue moved to its George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, the oldest museum in the world dedicated to photography. But the Smithsonian Institution said no. But then a few years later, in 1969, it was removed and out it storage, and was not on public view for the next two decades. In 1989, in honor of the 150th anniversary of photography, the Daguerre Memorial was re-dedicated and placed in it’s current location.
The subject of the memorial, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, better known as Louis Daguerre, was born on November 18, 1787. He was an accomplished French painter and a developer of the diorama theatre. But he was most famous for his contributions to photography.
Deguerre became interested in the 1820’s in the process of reproducing images by light exposure, which was first invented by a man named Nicéphore Niépce in 1822. In 1829 Daguerre partnered with Niépce, and after refining the process significantly, lent his name to the improved process, which became known as the daguerreotype process.
A daguerreotype, unlike its predecessor, required only minutes of light exposure to fix an image on a light-sensitive, polished silver plate, thus creating a usable image that was then refined with various chemicals. The improvement was so significant that the French Academy of Science acquired the intellectual property rights to the process and on August 19, 1839, the French Government presented the invention as a gift from France “free to the world”, and complete working instructions were published. Because of this, it became the first photographic process to be used widely in Europe and the United States, and caused Deguerre to become known as one of the fathers of photography.
[Click on the photos to view the full-size versions]
Note: Inscriptions on the front and sides of the granite base of the memorial read: Photography, The Electric Telegraph, And The Steam Engine Are The Three Great Discoveries Of The Age.; No Five Centuries In Human Progress Can Show Such Strides As These. (and); To Commemorate The First Half-Century In Photography 1839-1889. Erected By The Photographer’s Association Of America, August, 1890.
The DC Bike Blogger 