They're very, very intimate, and there is a ghostly quality
to them. They're like these souls that linger on in these
little precious boxes.
Today I am extremely excited to be showing you some beautiful
pocket treasures we have within our collection.
The first process I'm going to speak about today
is the daguerreotype process. Daguerreotypes were
invented in 1839 by Louis Daguerre. These were the first
commercially viable types of photographs, so they captured
the public's imagination straightaway. A daguerreotype is
made by exposing an image on a silver-plated sheet of copper.
It could take up to 30 minutes to produce a daguerreotype so
sitters would have to sit still as they possibly could, in order
for a photographer to render
their image. These were not available in multiples. They
were direct positives and they were one-off unique items, so they
were cherished. Really only the wealthy families could afford to
have them and it would have been a real sign of status if a
family could afford to have more than one and we can see this
lovely cluster of daguerreotypes here, which come from the one family.
We can see a grandfather, a father and a grandson.
So they're all from the one Tasmanian family.
The youngest member of the group is hand-coloured
You can see there's a lovely shade of red in the cheeks,
which gives the youthful look to the boy and
also in his lips.
They're very, very intimate, and there is a ghostly quality to them.
They're like these souls that linger on in these little precious boxes,
and you have to search to find them.
The second process that we're going to look at today is the ambrotype.
The ambrotype is quite different to the daguerreotype
because an ambrotype is basically on a
glass support rather than a metal support.
Ambrotypes pretty much took over from the daguerreotype simply because
they were much easier to produce and could be produced in a
matter of minutes. The image produced is in fact a negative,
but the process involves placing your glass sheet onto a dark
surface in order to create what looks like a positive.
So there's a little bit of foolery in this particular process.
And what's really, really beautiful about this particular image,
is we see an older man surrounded by
three younger girls, possibly his grandchildren.
But if you look at the details of this ambrotype,
it has been hand-coloured and we can see some
beautiful red tinting in the flowers that the girls are holding
left and right of the image.
And this beautiful, vibrant green top on the older girl.
What's particularly important to note, I guess, with ambrotypes,
is that they're on glass, and the fact that they've survived
over this amount of time is really quite special. So someone
has taken the time to look after this particular item over a
period of possibly 160 years.
The tintype is a process that was patented in 1856.
So very, very soon after the advent of the ambrotype, and in fact the tintype
completely took over from the ambrotypes. Now the tintype
is really the beginning of mass photography, so we have the
daguerreotype being very, very rare. The ambrotype a little bit
more readily available, but the tintype being such a cheap process
every class of society could afford to buy a tintype and as
a result we see the advent of a number of street photographers
all around the country. You could literally approach a street photographer
and have an image taken of yourself in a matter of moments.
Now, very often these tintypes were
presented in simple paper folders, so nowhere near as
decorative as the cases we see for the ambrotypes and daguerreotypes.
As families began to gather more of these, albums
were produced, very much like photo albums we would have had
today or in the recent past, and we can see a lovely example of a
tintype album here. And you can see what's so beautiful is
the honest representation of
people in the middle of the 1800s.
So when looking back on these three early photographic
processes, it's interesting to see how they paved the way for
modern photography. Today we hold our cameras in our pockets
and we can take an image so instantaneously.
It really reminds me of why I love my job of being a conservator.
I get to work with these intimate pocket treasures, I get to handle them,
and I get to preserve the spirits of the people captured
in these photo albums so that their legacies can remain.