Untitled [portrait of a woman] c. 1844 - 1852

This portrait of an unknown woman was made by Jeremiah Gurney, a pioneering New York photographer, sometime in the mid-19th century. It's a daguerreotype, an early photographic process that creates a remarkably detailed image on a silvered copper plate. The plate's surface has a mirror-like quality, which means that the image changes depending on the light and the viewer's position. The process involved coating the plate with light-sensitive chemicals, exposing it in a camera, and then developing the image with mercury vapor. It was painstaking work. The final image is incredibly delicate, so it's housed behind glass in a decorative case. Daguerreotypes were luxury items, desired for their realism. They democratized portraiture, making images available to a wider public, beyond the elites who could afford painted portraits. So, while the materials might seem precious to us now, this photograph was at the cutting edge of a new, industrial kind of image-making. It represents a shift in how people saw themselves and wanted to be seen by others. It marks a democratization of art, enabled by technological innovation.