Ralph Waldo Emerson and Photography

I’m pretty bookish so when I found out Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a book in the early 1850s and happened to put a whole bunch of stuff about early photography in it, I just had to read it. I mean, photography was literally only ten years old at that point.

The House of the Seven Gables (a ghost story!) is a pretty slow read, so I don’t really recommend it unless you’re into that kind of thing.

But as a special treat, in the back of the book, they snuck in a little bit by Ralph Waldo Emerson (a big deal American poet) concerning what we do as photographers.

The “Daguerreotype (early word for photograph) gives the sculpture of the face, but omits the expression, the painter aims at the expression & comes far short of Daguerre in the form and organism. But we must have sea and shore, the flowing & the fixed, in every work of art. On the sitter, the effect of the Daguerreotypist is asinizing.” (Emerson, 1846)

I have no clue what that last word means (and neither does my dictionary), but I’m determined to make Mr Emerson proud with my daguerreotypy.