Abstract
Daguerreotypes are, today, the last material remains of the first photographic procedure made available to everyone in 1839 by Jaques Louis Mandé Daguerre. Understanding the daguerreotype in depth allows us to understand the bases of photography and its conservation.
A daguerreotype is a direct, unique and fragile image that, depending on the viewer's angle of observation, appears as a positive or a negative. When this unique image was judged good by the photographer and his client, it was endowed with a presentation / preservation montage at the aesthetic height of the precious contained image. Depending on the customs, uses and ways of life of each country, these presentation systems could be a mounting on a passepartout or decorated frame, or a case. Most of the daguerreotypes that have reached our days have been thanks to their assembly, since this constitutes both chemical and physical protection against agents of deterioration.
The objective of this work is to document the origin, development, production, presentation and morphological structure of the boxed daguerreotypes. For this, a bibliographic review has been carried out in order to show the processes, procedures and materials necessary to obtain a boxed daguerreotype. Subsequently, a morphological study of it has been carried out, defining the elements that make up its structure, in order to understand its complexity and the role that each of the present elements plays in the conservation of the artifact. To complete the morphological study, the main original sealing and presentation systems of daguerreotypes used in the 19th century have been analyzed, preparing a chronologically ordered compilation of instructions for sealing and assembling the Daguerrean plates, extracted mainly from treatises from the heyday of the daguerreotype, from 1839 to 1860.