Untitled (Niagara Falls)
关于作品
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.
芝加哥藝術博物館CC BY 4.0
作品信息
- 馆藏编号
- 1970.222
画面内容
已收入目录
出处
- 芝加哥藝術博物館
- 图片： 芝加哥藝術博物館 — CC0
![[Winter scene at Niagara Falls], Platt D. Babbitt, about 1853](https://media.getty.edu/iiif/image/064e7d59-b72f-4416-8118-c31bb603c023/full/!1200,1200/0/default.jpg)
![[Couple at Niagara Falls], Platt D. Babbitt, about 1855](https://media.getty.edu/iiif/image/99a432c5-aa14-4c88-9e12-b26f60b40c8f/full/!1200,1200/0/default.jpg)
![[Niagara Falls with couple in foreground], Platt D. Babbitt, about 1855](https://media.getty.edu/iiif/image/1ad4eac4-99cd-4ee8-ad9e-037121a13afb/full/!1200,1200/0/default.jpg)
![[Scene at Niagara Falls], Platt D. Babbitt, about 1855](https://media.getty.edu/iiif/image/09e27083-f061-4d68-ae52-5abb46543c22/full/!1200,1200/0/default.jpg)
