Snapshots of an alternate reality
The sheer wonder of the universe that focused acutely on a Paris studio at the moment Louis Daguerre first unlocked the secret of photography is stirringly – and fictitiously – captured by Josh Russell in “Yellow Jack” (WW Norton & Company, 1999), a “biography” of Louis Jacques Mandé Marchand
Russell invented Marchand, called Claude Marchand, as Daguerre’s assistant. That’s the great man, the real-life hero, in the photo above, making his second discovery, which was the unnatural pose.
In Russell’s acclaimed first novel, Marchand becomes the first American daguerreian, opening a studio in New Orleans in the fall of 1838, and soon after staging the first public display of daguerreotypes – he calls them soliotypes.
This was many months before Daguerre’s official announcement of August 19, 1839, when the painter Paul Delaroche contemplated the brutal honesty of the photograph and famously declared, “From today, painting is dead!”, though there’s no proof that he actually did. See the rest.
