Distant Voices
SOLD August 2000 |
Anonymous quarter plate daguerreotype showing a group of three, with applied color, ca. 1840s. Housed in full leather case.
For better or worse, letters are significantly less important to 21st century life than they were in the 19th, an age in which physical distance represented a real separation from those "nearest and dearest", separation which could be bridged only by the letter, simultaneously a physical token and the recorded speech of the distant. Letters were thus not exclusively concerned with the transmission of information but with the sharing of emotions and experiences. Read aloud to the family as a whole, the letter from "Dear Aunt Sarah" or "Uncle Jack in Ohio" brought the hearers, in their imagination, into the presence of the distant writer, allowing them to live his experiences as they would have, had they actually been present.
This moody image shows an early daguerreotypist in complete command of his expressive medium. Like all the strongest daguerreotypes from the 1840s, it eschews mechanized, assembly-line detail for the underlined expression of emotions, and says just what it has to, and no more.
