The History of Early American Photography
A history of early American photography organized mainly around inventions and celebrated photographers can obscure part of what made the medium socially transformative. Photographs circulated as cased objects, album pages, domestic keepsakes, and pocket-sized mementos. Photography became important not only because certain photographers created exceptional images, but because people found new ways to commission, exchange, display, and preserve them.
In a May 24, 2025 review for The New Yorker, photography critic Vince Aletti considers the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910. The exhibition, which ran from April 11 through July 20, 2025, placed established photographers such as Alice Austen, Carleton Watkins, and Mathew Brady beside amateurs, little-studied practitioners, and works whose makers have not been identified.
For this American exhibition, the practical starting point is the daguerreotype. Public announcements in France and Britain in 1839 brought years of photographic experimentation into widespread view. Nicéphore Niépce had produced photographic images during the 1820s, and William Henry Fox Talbot began his paper-based experiments during the following decade.
François Arago presented Louis Daguerre’s invention to the Académie des Sciences in Paris on January 7, 1839; its technical steps were publicly disclosed at a joint academy session on August 19. Talbot had produced paper camera negatives by 1835, announced his photogenic-drawing process in 1839, and patented the calotype in 1841. Unlike the daguerreotype, his negative-positive system allowed multiple positive prints to be made from one negative.
These were not merely two versions of the same process. They created different relationships between the photographic object and its possible copies. A daguerreotype is a direct-positive camera image formed on a copper plate coated with a thin layer of silver. Because the plate itself is the camera image and there is no printing negative, identical photographic prints cannot be made from it. An original could nevertheless be rephotographed as another daguerreotype or translated into an engraving or lithograph.
American portrait daguerreotypes were commonly protected by a brass mat and cover glass and placed in wood, leather-covered, paper-covered, or later thermoplastic cases, although framed and uncased examples also survive. Their mirror-polished surfaces can appear positive, negative, or reflective as the lighting and viewing angle change. The Library of Congress glossary of daguerreotype terms explains how the plate, mat, glass, preserver, and case formed a single physical object.
The process required specialist knowledge, but it developed rapidly as a commercial service. The Library of Congress records more than seventy daguerreotype studios in New York City by 1850. That figure demonstrates the expansion of the photographic trade, although it does not mean that everyone could afford a portrait or control how an image was made and used.
Later wet-collodion formats changed cost, speed, portability, and durability. Ambrotypes and tintypes were quicker and cheaper to produce than daguerreotypes. An ambrotype is an underexposed collodion negative on glass viewed against a dark backing, which makes its tones appear positive. A tintype uses a collodion image on a thin sheet of dark-lacquered iron. Both normally functioned as unique camera-exposed objects rather than as negatives intended for producing editions of paper prints.
Tintypes were lightweight and less liable to shatter than glass ambrotypes, although their iron supports could corrode and their image surfaces remained vulnerable to scratching. The Library of Congress account of ambrotypes and tintypes describes both formats as quicker and cheaper than daguerreotypes while emphasizing their different physical supports. By contrast, a deliberately made negative could be used to produce multiple paper positives.
Reproducibility expanded how photographs circulated. Carte-de-visite cameras could expose several images or poses on a single glass-plate negative. After the negative was contact printed, the small photographs were cut apart and mounted on cards. Economical cartes—especially portraits—were traded, given to friends and family, and collected in purpose-made albums.
Stereographs paired two photographs made from slightly different viewpoints. Viewed through a stereoscope, they produced the illusion of a single three-dimensional image. These reproducible and card-mounted formats greatly expanded photography’s circulation as personal likeness, collectible image, commercial product, and domestic entertainment.
These changes should not be described as a simple progression from inferior processes to superior ones. Different formats overlapped, even as their relative popularity changed across particular uses and markets. Each offered a different combination of detail, cost, reproducibility, portability, speed, and durability.
A study by Anne A. Verplanck focused on mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia found that daguerreotypes supplemented older portrait forms and influenced painted and printed portraits rather than immediately replacing them. The study supports rejecting a simple replacement narrative within that particular market; it does not establish how every photographic format developed throughout the United States.
Aletti’s attention to unidentified makers is therefore important. “Unknown maker” describes the present state of an attribution and its surviving documentation. By itself, the designation does not tell us how the photographer was regarded at the time, what purpose the picture served, or whether it mattered to its owners. Such photographs can enter history through their making, use, circulation, and preservation, whether the maker’s name was never recorded or was later lost.
The exhibition’s democratic interpretation nevertheless requires qualification. Lower prices and a growing studio trade widened access, but being photographed did not necessarily mean controlling the resulting image. The fifteen daguerreotypes of Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty, seven people enslaved in South Carolina, were made by Joseph T. Zealy in Columbia in 1850. They were commissioned by Robert Gibbes for the Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz rather than by the people depicted.
The photographs preserve images of seven named individuals, but they were produced within slavery for a project in scientific racism intended to support Agassiz’s theory of polygenesis. Their survival therefore demonstrates why broader photographic access should not be confused with agency, consent, or control.
Other photographs could be used very differently. The Met’s account of the exhibition discusses Black Americans’ use of portrait photography to construct positive self-images and challenge degrading stereotypes. Photography could therefore support self-representation while also serving racial classification and coercive documentation. Photographic access and photographic agency are related, but they are not the same thing.
Nor was the exhibition a comprehensive history of American photography. Its approximately 275 photographs were drawn from the William L. Schaeffer Collection, assembled by Schaeffer over approximately fifty years and promised to the Met by Jennifer and Philip Maritz. A small selection of nineteenth-century American cameras was separately lent for the exhibition.
Survival, acquisition, attribution, cataloguing, and curatorial selection all influence the history that can now be seen. A privately assembled collection may expand the photographic canon without establishing what was typical throughout the United States between 1839 and 1910.
The article is worth reading because it approaches early American photography as both an art and a social practice. The history explored here cannot be written from photographers’ names alone. It also depends on how subjects were posed or compelled to appear, how pictures circulated, what owners preserved, and what collectors and museums eventually selected.
See: “How American Photography Came Into Its Own”, by Vince Aletti, The New Yorker, May 24, 2025.
Note: This post contains independent interpretations, summaries, and contextual analysis. Readers should consult the original sources for their authors’ complete reporting, arguments, and evidence.
Extra: A Closer Look at Tintypes
The following five-minute film, produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and narrated by exhibition curator Jeff Rosenheim, examines tintypes from the William L. Schaeffer Collection. Tintypes represent only one part of The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910, but they provide a particularly clear example of how a photographic process could affect cost, portability, presentation, and the people and occasions recorded by the camera.