Making a Case: Daguerreotypes

Abstract

This essay considers physical daguerreotype cases from the 1840s and 1850s alongside scholarly debate on case studies, or “thinking in cases”, and some recent physicalist claims about objects in cultural theory, particularly those associated with “new materialism”. Throughout the essay, these three distinct strands are braided together to interrogate particular objects and broader questions of cultural history. It contributes to thinking about daguerreotypes and their cases, but it does so in order to interrogate thinking in cases and objecthood as a legal category. I argue that daguerreotypes have to be understood as image-thing amalgams, paying particular attention to the construction and distinguishing marks on the cases and frames that enclose these images. These cases, particularly those of the patent holder Richard Beard, are situated within legal debates on property and cannot be understood without attention to social relations of capital and class.

Keywords

• daguerreotype
• photography
• history of photography