Daguerreotypy, Democratizing and the Fall of Light

摘要

This article argues that the idea of light modelled by the nineteenth-century daguerreotype signifies a radical departure from its elitist historical associations and makes the claim that, under the precepts of early daguerreotypy, light underwent a democratizing process that bore a new relationship with the perceiver and the objects they perceived, which had a profound influence on the development of material culture. This study finds, first, that nineteenth-century daguerreotypy initiated a new technological relationship with objects, because objects were henceforth regarded for their luminosity, and secondly, that in the wake of the Enlightenment period, light was conceptualized by new ideologies which imagined the individual as creator, as opposed to God. Newton had already exposed the Romantic mind to the indiscriminate character of 'Nature's', or light's, colouring, but Goethe's Colour Theory (1830), with its descriptions of the subjective nature of seeing and the subtleties of light's properties in relation to the eye, deeply promblematized the concept of 'light Divine'. The article concludes that the daguerreotype's ambivalent negative/positive reflections are paradigmatic of the collapse of binary moralizing and emblematic of the ambiguity of 'truth' in the new framework of perceptual vision.