Margaret Frances Langton Clarke 1864

Curator: This is a silver print daguerreotype made in England in 1864, a portrait of Margaret Frances Langton Clarke by Lewis Carroll. Editor: What strikes me immediately is the fragility. The sepia tone, the way the light catches the silver – it feels almost like holding a memory. You can almost feel the cool, smooth texture of the plate beneath the emulsion. Curator: Absolutely. Daguerreotypes were quite unique in their time. They offered a level of detail previously unseen. The process itself, involving polishing a silver-plated copper sheet and using mercury fumes, speaks to a very different relationship to materials and labor. Editor: It's laborious, isn't it? The focus required, the cost... This wasn't casual photography. And look at the details: her clothes, her boots. The care and time somebody put into creating not just the image, but these garments themselves. A portrait is often also an opportunity for showing status. Curator: Precisely. The fact that the Clarke family commissioned Lewis Carroll to create this work suggests a certain level of social standing and an understanding of the cultural currency of photographic portraiture. Such photos offered new ways of seeing and being seen, contributing to social narratives about identity and respectability. Editor: And the doll… It is a manufactured object that mimics life, presented to this little girl to make her aware of her position in society: woman, mother. What does it say about how we commodify childhood and mold gender? Curator: It’s a starkly beautiful reminder of how image-making is deeply enmeshed within social and industrial forces. It reflects ideas of childhood, family, class, and gender at a particular moment in Victorian England. The photo has a long exposure, it took the young sitter long minutes to stay still to fix her pose, adding to that an almost ghostly air about her. Editor: The amount of craft to build those backdrops, those clothes, those toys to tell people how to behave is insane! It is like all of this stuff, carefully positioned and placed into the photograph, gives Margaret more weight than she is really old, it enhances the image, it increases its presence. I do admire that process of capturing, how that has been able to capture one face on this metal and it gives the spectator the access to know more. Curator: And looking at this daguerreotype again, you notice something new with each viewing. Editor: A single silver plate revealing so much—about its subject, its maker, and the time it was made in. Fascinating!