My dead boyfriends

The daguerreotype was the first workable photographic process - and these two daguerreotypes are unique.  Not only was it a highly poisonous process (fumes of mercury were necessary), but it was also a 'one-off' process.  These two plates that I own were in their respective cameras metres away from these subjects about one hundred and seventy-five years ago, when the images were taken.  There are no copies with this process.  The thin emulsion sits on the surface of a reflective metal plate and is extremely delicate.  Care must be taken not to touch the emulsion, for it is easily rubbed off.  All daguerreotypes are under glass and sealed from the outside air.

The sitters, in the words of Lyle Rexer are "not exactly alive, but on the edge of being present .."  It is this ability to so intimately capture the spirit of life that the invention was given the moniker 'a mirror with a memory'.  And it is for this reason that I had no choice but to capture them both from the side.  A straight-on photo would give a ghostly silver image.

For all of their antiquity, they employ a startlingly modern matrix.  In terms of the physics of it, it is actually nanotechnology.  The grains in the emulsion are nano-particles of a silver and mercury amalgam which reflects light.  Fine details are captured due to the fact that a single plate can have trillions or even quadrillions of submicroscopic metallic particles on its surface.

I'd like to own a few more handsome men, but the prices can be steep, and large plates run in the thousands of dollars.  The two that I have are a 'ninth plate' (the first one) and a 'sixth plate'.  A ninth plate was the second to smallest made.  And they are alive.  They should be stored upside down so that any chemicals that bleed from the glass can't settle on the emulsion below it.  Fungus can grow, destroying the image.

There has been some hand colouring of the second image, with a faded pale magenta colouring the man's shirt under his vest.  I love the fellow's top hat and his pile of books.  Both of my men are comparatively young.  There is no grey hair between them.  The first fellow may even be 18 or 19 years old, the second in his late 20s or early 30s, but I have no way at all of knowing for sure.  And I must be careful not to view their faces through a skewed filter of time or our present culture.

Ramón 80

Dicks, dicks, dicks ..