Untitled (Niagara Falls)
Platt D. Babbitt
c. 1853
Medium
Daguerreotype
Dimensions
13.4 × 18.6 cm (5 5/16 × 7 3/8 in.)
Classification
daguerreotype
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
33540
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Niagara Falls, like other popular tourist destinations in the 19th century, was once only accessible through travel. With the invention and proliferation of photography after 1839, however, visitors could take home the scenes they saw. To create a daguerreotype—a small picture on silver-plated copper, nicknamed a "mirror with a memory"—a photographer painstakingly polished the plate, sensitized it in a bath of chemicals, and exposed it to light for a few seconds to several minutes. The resulting...