What is Lost & Found?

The invention of photography in 1839 marked a turning point in the history of art. It sparked something comparable to a democratization of the image, making the portrait genre more widely available to the general public than ever before. The first form of the photograph, named for Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, was the daguerreotype. The daguerreotype was not the result of Daguerre's singular efforts but rather a combination of research and experimentation conducted by Daguerre and Joseph Nicephore Niepce. Both men worked with the camera obscura in their attempts to permanently capture an image taken from nature. The camera obscura, literally meaning "black box," is an enclosed box with a small hole at one end that allows light to pass through the chamber and cast an image on an opposite wall. Using the camera obscura, Niepce fixed the first photograph onto a pewter plate, and soon after Daguerre's discoveries produced what was to become the first photographic process.

During the decades following Daguerre's invention, capitalists, scientists, and others worked to develop photographic processes that were more cost and time efficient. Their experiments produced the ambrotype in 1852, followed by the tintype, which was patented in 1856. The varying forms of the new medium were all valued for different reasons, but Americans happily embraced each one and early practitioners of photography employed them to record the face of the nation.

At the center of this exhibition is a selection of photographic portraits commemorating the collection of never before exhibited daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes from the Seaver Center for Western History Research at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Each portrait is a valuable historical document, a tiny record of nineteenth-century American society that bears witness to the birth of photography. These photographs are also objects of artistic significance; a combination of a photographer's prowess behind the camera and a craftsman's expertise, as reflected in the intricately decorated cases that enclose each image.

Over one hundred and fifty years have passed since the beginning of photography, and the process of capturing an image has now been reduced to the click of a button. Despite the apparent ease with which a photograph can be made, contemporary artists Chuck Close, Jayne Hinds Bidaut, Stephen Berkman, and Luis González Palma have opted for a more labor intensive, hands-on approach. Their work with the daguerreotype, ambrotype, and tintype exemplifies both the technological and the artistic revival of these early non-paper processes.

Lost and forgotten for over one hundred years, these early photographic processes are being rediscovered by the hands of contemporary artists. What is also found are the people who made a history of their own—in front of and behind the camera—when those processes were first born. Captured in the silent stillness of portraits, they now create a dialogue with us, celebrating their rebirth here at this moment.

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