Dr. Cook 1843 - 1847

Curator: My goodness, what a ghostly apparition! There’s something so dreamlike about this. Is it the light? The soft focus? He looks like he's about to vanish. Editor: Indeed. What you're responding to, I believe, is partly due to it being a daguerreotype by Hill and Adamson. They captured this likeness of a gentleman, known as Dr. Cook, sometime between 1843 and 1847. You can see it currently resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Curator: Dr. Cook… he looks rather… unappetizing, to be honest! Just kidding—a very human looking face. And is that his walking stick he's clasping so carefully? Editor: Yes, that's right. The walking stick perhaps symbolizes status, certainly. Think about its historical role – often as an emblem of authority, wisdom, or simply, as an aid to navigation and exploration of the world. Even further back, the staff in allegorical paintings or myths. Perhaps also about reliance during his time, it suggests presence and steadiness to me. Curator: He's clinging to it for dear life! I see romanticism lurking in the misty haze, a quiet melancholy around this photographic endeavor, a sense of holding onto reality while recognizing its fleeting nature. Editor: Precisely. And think about what daguerreotypes meant then: The rise of the photographic portrait shifted notions about mortality and memory—who gets remembered and how. Before, only the wealthiest families could imagine affording likenesses for centuries. Now a "likeness" was within grasp, and a tool against death itself! Curator: Hmm. Interesting! Like grabbing smoke and claiming it's a portrait, even today photography gives you the sensation of somehow "conquering" time itself, in some absurd sense. Though, for Dr. Cook here, the effect is not victory but solemn reflection. I feel the gaze upon our world beyond him and outside our immediate surroundings, our relationship to memory, its fading and its power to echo with us. Editor: Absolutely. It makes one wonder about the lives and the afterlives of the subjects we glimpse in these antique photographs. Curator: And wonder… is my photograph hanging in a museum?