This week I have been trying to conquer the challenge of stereo and have added the result to my gallery page. It is of a Pataka, a traditional Maori food storage house and is presented in one of my passe partout with the reverse painted cover glass. A true challenge for a dyslexic person to put together!

Daguerreotypist Åke Hultman has started a small gallery that goes by the name of KONST & KAMERA.
The recent inaugral exhibition was of artworks of three local artists in north of Sweden, but in the future he intends to exhibit Daguerreotypes and cameras from his collection.

KONST & KAMERA
Västertjäl 550, 89396 Sidensjö SWEDEN
Tel: +46 660262090, +46703706605
http://daguerre.info.se

A new gallery has been added to the technology glaeries showing the camera of Walter Johnson. Walter also sent in a for shooting with daguerreotype plates, which has been added to the general writing section of the resources pages.

Folllowing on from our recent post about the oldest living daguerreian here is an image from possibly the youngest. 8 year old Grania operated the camera and lenscap entirely by herself and timed the exposure (with a little help from Dad with a lightmeter)…

We are very pleased to announce the addition of a new gallery showing the work of Tom Young, another of the daguerréians who became active with the process in the seventies. In Tom’s own words:

In 1973 my interest in and involvement with photography turned to its history and, in particular, the practice of early photographic processes.

By 1974 I was daguerréotyping and although I also succeeded in obtaining images from the camera by means of other early photographic processes, the charming process of M. Daguerre had won a place in my heart not shared by the others. It remains to this day my primary avenue of photographic expression.

Thomas E. S. Young II

New to Irv’s gallery is a 5×7 plate documenting natures form.

Daguerreotyping like a man possessed, Casey has made good use of the summer sun, with 8 new images added to his gallery. Signature to his style are the birch wood mats he uses to great effect.

A recent portrait by Eric Mertens sheds light on our oldest living practitioner, Ray Phillips, who learnt the finer points of the process from Charles Tremear, the patriarch of the twentieth-century daguerreotype in America. The latter operated a studio from 1929 till his death in 1943, in Greenfield Village, part of the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Tremear was a traveling tintypist until he found work with Ford Motor Company in 1909, and in 1929 was asked to create authentic “old-style” tintypes for visitors to Greenfield Village. Tremear made portraits of about 100,000 persons, including Thomas Edison, Joe Louis and Walt Disney. Beyond the tintypes, though, he taught himself the daguerreotype process using original equipment and manuals.

Ray Phillips had been working on the process since 1936 before he had a portrait sitting early one morning in 1941 with Charles Tremear. Ray was so inspired by the event that he went home and talked his dad into putting skylights into the garage to upgrade his facilities. Ray continued to make daguerreotypes over the next 15 years before moving his efforts and resources into phonographs.

This latest portrait sitting was facilitated by tintypist René Rondeau (a friend of Ray Phillips) and it was a day Eric will always remember, filled with daguerreian anecdotes and great conversation.

Images below show the portrait and the day at Eric’s studio.