History of Photography
A short compilation of quotes related to the daguerreotype:

"People were afraid at first to look for any length of time at the pictures produced.  They were embarrassed by the clarity of these figures and believed that the little, tiny faces of the people in the pictures could see out at them, so amazing did the unaccustomed detail and the unaccustomed truth to nature of the first daguerreotype pictures appear to everyone."

                           - Max Dauthenday, quoted by Walter Benjamin in A Short History of Photography


"I am composed of a multitude of spectra which intersperse my body in a great number of layers.  Your plates will never be able to catch these spectra which form my essential self, but can only record some pose of my body."

                                    - Balzac, quoted by Alex Strasser in Immortal Portraits, London, 1848.


 "Painting is dead from this day!"  - Paul Delaroche, 1839

"Wanting to hold fast to transitory mirror-pictures is not only an impossibility, as has been shown by basic German research, but even the wish to do so is blasphemy.  Man is created in the image of God, and God’s image cannot be captured by any man-made machine.  Only the supremely inspired artist may dare, when he is driven by Heavenly inspiration and in the highest command of his genius and without the help of the machine, to try to reproduce man’s Godlike features...The man who begins such a thing must arrogantly consider himself even wiser than the Creator of the World.....Now: Should this same God, who for thousands of years has never allowed that mirror-pictures of men should be fadeless, should this same God suddenly become untrue to His eternal principles and allow that a Frenchman from Paris should set loose such a devilish invention into the world!!?  We must make clear, after all, how unChristian and hellishly vain mankind would become if everyone could have his own mirror-picture made for filthy money and reproduced by the dozen.  There would be such a mass epidemic of vanity that mankind would become godlessly superficial and godlessly vain.  And if this "Mon-sewer" Daguerre in Paris maintains a hundred times that his human mirror-pictures can be held fast on silver plates, this must a hundred times be called an infamous lie, and it is not worthwhile that German masters of optics concern themselves with this impertinent claim."

                                                                                 - Leipzig City Advertiser, 1839


"All nature shall paint herself - fields, rivers, trees, houses, plains, mountains, cities, shall all paint themselves at a bidding, and at a few moment’s notice.  Towns will no longer have any representative but themselves.  Invention says it.  It has found out the one thing new under the sun: that, by virtue of the sun’s patent, all nature, animate and inanimate, shall be henceforth its own painter, engraver, printer, and publisher.  Here is a revolution in art ... to keep you all down, ye painters, engravers, and alas! the harmless race, the sketchers.  All ye,before whose unsteady hands towers have toppled down upon the paper, and the pagodas of the East have bowed, hide your heads in holes and corners, and wait there till you are called for.  The "mountains of labor" will no more produce a mouse; it will produce itself, with all that is upon it."

- Nathaniel Willis, 1839


" ...The sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping.  This seems partly owing to the eye itself.  The eye is the best of artists...And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters.  There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful...Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man.  Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works...A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text.  By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause...

                                                                             - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836


"Still life, architecture - these are the triumphs of the apparatus which M. Daguerre wants to call after his own name the Daguerreotype.  A dead spider, taken through the solar microscope, has such fine detail in the drawing that you could study its anatomy with or without a magnifying glass, as in nature; not a filament, not a duct, as tenuous as might be, that you cannot follow and examine.  Travelers, you will soon be able, perhaps, at the cost of some hundreds of francs, to acquire the apparatus invented by M. Daguerre, and you will be able to bring back to France the most beautiful monuments, the most beautiful scenes of the whole world.  You will see how far from the truth of the Daguerreotype are your pencils and brushes.,  Let not the draftsman and painter despair;  M. Daguerre’s results are something else from their work, and in many cases cannot replace it.