Getty Museum

View within Crawford Notch, New Hampshire

Creator

American Daguerreotypist · 1793–1881

Photographer

In 1840, after witnessing a series of lectures and a demonstration of the daguerreotype process given by a licensed representative for Jacque-Louis Mandé Daguerre's process and equipment, Boston dentist Samuel Americanus Bemis bought a top-of-the-line daguerreotype camera for fifty-one dollars and twelve daguerreotype plates at two dollars each.. Four days after his purchase, Bemis made his first

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Date: about 1840
Medium: Daguerreotype
Culture: American
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

Boston dentist Samuel Bemis, one of the first Americans to use a daguerreotype outfit successfully, practiced photography during his summer months in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. His landscape views of the area are the earliest surviving American photographs to depict untamed nature. Here he depicts a scene of rugged beauty. An innovative amateur, Bemis was not a masterful technician of the complicated daguerreotype process. The dark tone of the sky and the light areas along the slope of the mountain indicate inadequate processing of the daguerreotype plate.

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