Art Institute of Chicago

Untitled (Niagara Falls)

Attributed to Platt D. Babbitt

Date

c. 1853

Medium

Daguerreotype

Culture

United States

Department

Photography and Media

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Niagara Falls, like other popular tourist destinations in the 19th century, was once only accessible through travel. With the invention and proliferation of photography after 1839, however, visitors could take home the scenes they saw. To create a daguerreotype—a small picture on silver-plated copper, nicknamed a "mirror with a memory"—a photographer painstakingly polished the plate, sensitized it in a bath of chemicals, and exposed it to light for a few seconds to several minutes. The resulting image was an irreproducible original with an unrivaled degree of sharpness. Tourists visiting Niagara Falls would have bought souvenir images like this one, which was likely made by the popular daguerreotypist Platt D. Babbitt, who sold his plates from a pavilion at Prospect Point. In order to maintain his monopoly, Babbitt supposedly thwarted the efforts of his rivals by waving umbrellas in front of the falls when they tried to make exposures.

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