Curious and Ingenious Art : Reflections on Daguerreotypes at Harvard

The collection includes the work of America's pioneering daguerreotypists, including Mathew Brady, Southworth and Hawes, and John Adams Whipple. Most notably, the Harvard collection preserved for posterity such faces of the era as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry James, James McNeill Whistler, Dorothea Dix, Jenny Lind, and even Tom Thumb.
Harvard also saw the potential of photography for scientific research, as stunningly exemplified in one of the first detailed daguerreotypes of the moon, taken in 1851, as well as in images capturing the emergence of modern anesthesia. An unfortunate misuse of photography is recalled in the now famous slave daguerreotypes commissioned by natural historian Louis Agassiz, who believed in the theory of separate human species.
The images represent the early history of photography and its use as a tool for documentation, scientific research, and artistic expression. A selection of daguerreotypes from the collections, some well known, others published for the first time, reveals the histories behind the images, stories which unveil in hauntingly beautiful detail the reflections of individuals who searched for purpose and promise in the new medium.