Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [548]
The novelty of daguerreotypy, along with its low start-up costs, attracted many to commercial photography during the depression. In 1843 the New York correspondent of a Washington newspaper wrote whimsically that “in these Jeremiad times” only two classes were making money in Manhattan: “the beggars and the takers of likenesses by daguerreotype.” Indeed, he added, ever since a Frenchman had set up shop selling apparatuses, “any pedlar can take up the trade.”
Mathew Brady was no peddler, though he did clerk for A. T. Stewart after moving to Manhattan from upstate New York in 1839. Then the young Irishman met Morse and discovered his life’s profession. In 1844, aged twenty-two, Brady opened the Daguerrean Miniature Gallery at Broadway and Fulton, on the top floor of a building directly across from Barnum’s.
Brady was an instant success, thanks to his talent and a Barnumesque flair for selfpromotion. Taking up residence at Astor House, he pursued and captured visiting celebrities so successfully that it was soon considered a mark of social standing and public distinction to be daguerreotyped by “Brady of Broadway.” He and his peers also made photography a public art form by opening their galleries to passersby. Strollers headed for Brady’s (or Gurney’s, Edward’s, or Anthony’s—all on Broadway near City Hall Park) to socialize and gaze at likenesses of the famous and notorious.
Brady had little interest in depicting ordinary working people (though in 1846 he did photograph inmates of the Blackwell’s Island penitentiary for a book on “reading” criminal heads). But others soon jumped into the business of providing “occupationals”—pictures of artisans in daily dress holding the tools of their trade. By 1850 there were seventy-one daguerreotype studios (employing 127 “operators”) ready to take one’s picture, and at least one that advertised a willingness to make house calls in order “to take Likenesses of sick or deceased persons.” By 1853 there were more such studios in Manhattan than in England, more on Broadway than in all London. By then, one magazine writer remarked, it was hard “to find the man who has not gone through the ‘operator’s’ hands from once to half-a-dozen times, or who has not the shadowy faces of his wife and children done up in purple morocco and velvet, together or singly, among his household treasures.”
As mechanized “daguerreotype factories” sprang up, driving down prices and speeding up delivery, photographers who sought an upscale clientele proclaimed themselves artists, not mechanics. Brady, to underscore his superior status and keep up with his migrating market, repeatedly moved uptown into ever finer surroundings. By 1853 his gallery on upper Broadway boasted satin walls, gilded chandeliers, and a mirrored parlor for the ladies.
The streets themselves continued to draw droves of daguerreotypists, especially in the latter 1850s, when new technologies made collection and dissemination of outdoor images easier. Such photographs could now be turned into lithographs, for reprinting in newspapers, and in the 1850s photographs became the basis of urban scenes published in Harper’s and Leslie’s.
Seizing on the latest technical improvements, Edward Anthony snapped freezeframe images of Broadway street life (including pedestrians caught in midstride) and mounted two such shots, taken from slightly different angles, on a double print card called a stereograph. Viewers could insert these into an inexpensive and widely available stereoscope, a double magnifier that produced the illusion of three-dimensionality. Oliver Wendell Holmes raved at Anthony’s ability to “snatch at the central life of a mighty city, as it rushed by in all its multitudinous complexity