New to the galleries section are the Daguerreotypes of Jerry Spagnoli. Jerry’s studio in gallery district of Chelsea in New York city has played host to many famous personages (try to guess who is the celebrity hand model on his book cover) and his outdoor daguerreotypy takes him around the world. Jerry uses the mercurial process, often works in the whole plate format and teaches workshops on the process (see the events page of this site).

Recently added to the Galleries are views of equipment both modern and vintage; fuming boxes, modern meters including a uv light meter and also fume hoods. The latter gallery is in response to a discussion on the DagForum, where details are furnished of the portable fumehood.

I have been a long time fan of the Jewelers bench exchange which shows jewelry workers workspaces from all over the world, ranging from the impressive to the humble. The first two scenes on the fumehood page get both ends of that scale but it would be interesting and educational to see more, if you would like to contribute images, email them to admin(at)contemporarydaguerreotypes.info.

New to the galleries section are the Daguerreotypes of Takashi Arai. Takashi uses the Becquerel process and lives in Japan.

As a commmunity blog and to provide topics of discussion for the DagForum, Contemporary Daguerreotypists who submit images for the Galleries section will have there logins to this site upgraded to “Author”. This allows you (if you wish) to make posts in this blog and upload images into those posts. It is hoped that Daguerreotypists will post what they are pursuing in the genre, images that they have recently shot or general thoughts on the genre. All users can leave comments on this site and the DagForum itself is open to all. To read more about this please see the “About” section of the site.

Exhibits of Daguerreotypes don’t crop up very often and as a Daguerreotypist seeking inspiration I was very pleased to recently visit the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and find such an event.  This is the second exhibit for the Museum of Daguerreotypes, the last being in 2003 when I also happen to be in Paris.  That was a much larger exhibit with plates from private collections and part of it travelled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  The current exhibit, on until September is smaller in scope and are just from the colletions of the Musee d’Orsay, none the less my cup of inspiration runeth over.  

According to the exhibition catalogue the last exhibit brought about a flurry of collecting Daguerreotypes by the Musee.  It is odd that in France that Daguerre and the Daguerreotype is not more celebrated.  The exhibit had very fine examples of stereo Daguerreotypes and for some very fine passe partout, including the faux tortoiseshell type.

Exhibition  Catalogue (via Amazon) Musee D’Orsay collections search

As this a community website we would like to set up an gallery page for everyone out there making contemporary daguerreotypes. If you would like to contribute images, please email the images to the adminsistrators (admin(at)contemporarydaguerreotype.info) and you will have a gallery here on this site with a link to your own website if you have one. More info on this in the “About” section of this site”. Eric Mertins of Sweatnapper.net is the most recent addition to this part of the Galleries section.

One of the reasons in setting up this site was to provide a forum for contemporary daguerreotypists to discuss the process. As is often the case with good ideas, others come to them at the same time. Jon Lewis from Santa Fe recently set up www.dagforum.com , so now we are to pool our efforts to establish an active online Daguerreian community. The links on this site for the Forum now redirect to Jon’s forum site. Contemporarydaguerreotypes.info will concentrate on providing resources for the forums – artists work, images of related equipment , links etc.

Such endeavors take much time and effort so my initial shock at a similar forum has given way to relief that there is someone else also at the helm. Charlie Schreiners site , newdags.com, broke the ground that we hope to build on with software that automates the organizing of data posted, making it easy to add new daguerreotypists and their work to the websites. I look forward to working with Jon who also has web design experience.

Newly added to the website in the galleries section, are images of daguerreotype equipment. It has taken a bit for me to get this wordpress software that runs this site to do what I want. So if you are experiencing any viewing problems please drop me a line. If anyone has images they would like to add to the gallery categories just let me know.