Exploring Whitman

“The camera and plate are prepared, the lady must sit for her daguerreotype” (Whitman 41).

The daguerreotype is a type of photograph that was invented in 1839 by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. The photographic image is made on a photo-sensitive silver compound, silver halide, and developed by exposing the image to mercury vapor. The image produced is extremely delicate and many of the pictures are sealed in glass cases.

Daguerrotype is an important vocabulary word to know when studying Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass because it shows the inventions and developments that were popular around 1855.