Art: Sun Picture Historians

Most people are familiar with the camera as a recorder of contemporary history, but are unfamiliar with photographic records of the past. This past is not quite 100 years old. for it was in August 1839 that the Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, first publicly described his discovery. In the U. S. the first daguerreotypes were sometimes called “sun pictures,” and in a few years the clarity of U. S. sunlight was being declared the reason for the superiority of Yankee photographers. Published this week is the first attempt at a full history of these men, their methods, their successors up to 1890, and the sunlit instants preserved by them from life now vanished in America.*

Professor of chemistry in the University of Kansas, Author Taft devotes more than half his book to the decades before 1870 when west of the Mississippi was the U. S. frontier. Matthew B. (for nothing) Brady was then the affluent kingpin of Eastern photographers, organizer of the most ambitious photographic survey of the century—the Civil War in 7.000 plates. No tough daguerreotypist who trundled over the Great Plains in that period could afford such scope, though from the Gold Rush on, photographers went along with the pioneers, the troops, the railroads. A disheartening revelation of the Taft book is how much of their unpretentious but now invaluable work has been carelessly lost; almost as great a revelation is the amount that survives. Samples : a covered-wagon caravan forming a wide circle for the night; the U. S. mail-coach with riflemen atop it, leaving muddy Salt Lake City in the ’60s.

* PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE AMERICAN SCENE— RobertTaft—Macmillan ($10).