Louis Daguerre

The debut novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos reimagines the life of Louis Daguerre, the inventor of photography, who becomes convinced that the world is going to end when his mind unravels due to mercury poisoning. He is determined to reconnect with the only woman he has ever loved before the End comes. Louis Daguerre's story is set against the backdrop of a Paris prone to bohemian excess and social unrest. Poets and dandies debate art and style in the cafes while students and rebels fill the garrets with revolutionary talk and gun smoke. It is here, amid this strange and beguiling setting, that Louis Daguerre sets off to capture his doomsday subjects. Louis enlists the help of the womanizing poet Charles Baudelaire, known to the salon set as the "Prince of Clouds" and a jaded but beautiful prostitute named Pigeon. Together they scour the Paris underworld for images worthy of Daguerre's list. But Louis is also confronted by a chance to reunite with the only woman he's ever loved. Half a lifetime ago, Isobel Le Fournier kissed Louis Daguerre in a wine cave outside of Orleans. The result was a proposal, a rejection, and a misunderstanding that outlasted three kings and an emperor. Now, in the countdown to his apocalypse, Louis wants to understand why he has carried the memory of that kiss for so long.

Biographical And Science-Related Information, Examining The Life Of Louis Daguerre And His Invention Of Photography.

In the early 18th century the only way to preserve an image was with a pen, paper, or other drawing tools. Though several people had made progress in the development of photography, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre is perhaps the most famous. Daguerre spent most of his life as an artist. He was used to manipulating light and working with the chemicals of his paints. He sketched the images from a camera obscura and created realistic drawings. Using the camera obscura, Daguerre made an early photograph. In partnership with Niepce, Daguerre sought to make a lasting image. Though Niepce died in 1833, Daguerre continued to experiment. Between 1835 and 1837, he perfected his process, an early form of photography. Book jacket.

An intimate look at the journeys of two men—a gentleman scientist and a visionary artist—as they struggled to capture the world around them, and in the process invented modern photography During the 1830s, in an atmosphere of intense scientific enquiry fostered by the industrial revolution, two quite different men—one in France, one in England—developed their own dramatically different photographic processes in total ignorance of each other's work. These two lone geniuses—Henry Fox Talbot in the seclusion of his English country estate at Lacock Abbey and Louis Daguerre in the heart of post-revolutionary Paris—through diligence, disappointment and sheer hard work overcame extraordinary odds to achieve the one thing man had for centuries been trying to do—to solve the ancient puzzle of how to capture the light and in so doing make nature 'paint its own portrait'. With the creation of their two radically different processes—the Daguerreotype and the Talbotype—these two giants of early photography changed the world and how we see it. Drawing on a wide range of original, contemporary sources and featuring plates in colour, sepia and black and white, many of them rare or previously unseen, Capturing the Light by Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport charts an extraordinary tale of genius, rivalry and human resourcefulness in the quest to produce the world's first photograph.

This book contains the definitive account of Daguerre and the daguerreotype. It covers Daguerre's early work as the perfecter and promoter of the diorama; his collaboration with Niépce, the first man to produce a photograph, imperfect though it was; his extension of Niépce's experiments after Niépce's death; and the eventual development of the daguerreotype : a remarkably sensitive positve on a metal plate.