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.
After a row with Daguerre, Marchand leaves Paris “with one of the earliest cameras and as many of the silvered brass plates as my pockets could hold”. After creating a stir in America with his pictures, he is hailed there as the originator when Daguerre finally gets around to claiming his breakthrough in France. The New Orleans Bee crows, “It is no great surprise that the Europeans are aflutter about a miracle we have had for these many months. Once again America stands at the forefront of Science and Art.”
Marchand knows the truth but sees himself the co-discoverer, so he lets the newspapers crow.
In fact the technology was surreptitiously abducted from France and patented in England just days before the French government gave Daguerre the green light to go public.
This is an actual daguerreotype (well, a .jpg image of it tinted in Photoshop) of author and social reformer Annie Adams Fields, a friend of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Massachusetts Historical Society owns it.
Marchand does well with his camera, particularly during New Orleans’ annual yellow fever epidemics – the Yellow Jack of the title – when doctors advise the doomed and the next of kin to visit his studio and have portraits made for posterity. (This is quite true.) In 1845 Marchand photographs more than 400 of the dying and the newly deceased.
The mercury vapour used to develop daguerreotypes rots Marchand’s teeth and ultimately drives him mad, though his wife’s death in childbirth must be a factor to consider when his body is pulled from a canal on the morning of September 22, 1845, just 25 years old.
This is how Josh Russell describes the hour of Daguerre’s discovery in “Yellow Jack”:
Late into the night he and I toiled like alchemists, boiling quicksilver and iodine, soaking paper in albumen, brushing bromide on squares of plated copper. Faint forms appeared, their edges like smoke. Only because we’d aimed the camera obscura at the apple could we recognize the blurred globe.
One morning the answer came by accident. A silvered plate of copper had been stored in a cabinet in which I’d hidden a broken thermometer. An image resting invisibly on the plate was touched by mercury fumes and appeared as if by magic – a sunflower hung its round head.
We stood amazed by the sight. I saw instantly that a man’s faults would be impossible to hide if his portrait was made the same way. A weak chin would be weak, small ears small. I fell in love with that sunflower, with its heart of seeds and its petal-tongues. It was more perfect than a painting. Even the best painting adds something to the subject, either by its flawed attempt at replication or by vanity’s demand that nature be expanded, but the picture the sun had drawn had no such flaw. I wished I could have made my father’s portrait in the same way. I began to cry. I suggested we call the miracle soliotype. Daguerre ignored me and named the marvel like an explorer would an island – daguerreotype.
We did not sleep for days. I arranged fruit and jugs of flowers for dozens and dozens of still-lifes. When the mercury vapor magically filled a blank mirror with a scatter of apples and pears I felt like screaming out my joy. Daguerre laughed and slapped my back each time the process worked. When it failed we mourned. It seldom failed. He was sure to be wealthy beyond measure, but the secret had to be kept.
Always fun to find that someone’s reading — and enjoying, it seems — the book I had so much fun writing.
Very much enjoyed it, Josh! In fact when I first came across your book online, before I made the connection with the images above, I’d set aside marked “writing lesson”. That’s how much I like your way with words. Thanks for the visit and the comment.