Fireman
1850/60
Medium
Daguerreotype
Dimensions
Plate, sight: 8.8 × 6.7 cm (3 1/2 × 2 11/16 in.); Case: 12 × 9.4 × 1 cm (4 3/4 × 3 3/4 × 7/16 in.)
Classification
photograph
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
238936
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Inexpensive and astonishingly sharp, daguerreotypes were the most popular portrait form of the 1840s and 1850s. One subset of American daguerreotypes, so-called occupationals, showed workers posing with tools of their trade. These images celebrated American craft and labor, their subjects personifying traits like innovation, industriousness, and courage. This daguerreotype reveals that its sitter understood, and accommodated, the daguerreotype process, which reverses the image. To have his unit ...