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Sunday, December 21, 2014

Fantastic Find: Fixed in Time: A New and Helpful Guide to Dating Daguerreotypes

[Angry Child; Albert Bisbee, Child on a Rocking Horse, about 1855, daguerreotype, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment]

You might be lucky enough to have a ancestral daguerreotype tucked away in a drawer and you've been wondering when it was taken. There is help!

Sean William Nolan has come to your rescue via a post on the blog of the Photographic Historical Society of New England (PHSNE).
"His hard work and his scholarship are impressive. In Fixed in Time, available for all through a free download, he methodically lays out the process for making a best guess as to the age of cased daguerreotypes. He has spent years on this and it shows."
There is a Facebook page for Mr. Nolan's book and if you share you contact information with him, he has promised to keep you up to date on his research.

If you don't happen to have a daguerreotype but would like to look at some, there are online collections of them available from the Library of Congress, The Smithsonian, The J. Paul Getty Museum and the George Eastman House.

© 2014 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

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