Posts Tagged ‘daguerreotype’

Fellow Romantics and Normal People,

11th President James Knox Polk rocks my world and not because I’m stoned.

In life there are happy little things that appeal universally to everyone – like getting the crunchy, brown corner piece of macaroni & cheese or firing-up your Netflix cue on a rainy day. And then there are more esoteric things that appeal to a small clutch of peculiarly curated humans (yours truly among them) that make our hearts soar and our dreams toggle from wishful thinking to sweet reality. The experience I’m about to describe definitely falls into the latter category. It was my “macaroni & cheese moment” for the eccentrically endowed.

I have an extravagant interest in presidential history, so you’d not find it surprising I’ve grown especially enamored of the few extant presidential daguerreotypes taken at the dawn of photography (1839-1849). I’ve breathlessly examined these precious early daguerreotypes like a sculptor minutely studies the contours of his model to understand the interior superstructure supporting the external surface. I’ve pored over these images with wistful reverence, ardently projecting myself into the static black and white scenes to animate and colorize them while dreaming of meeting the personalities and experiencing the tenor of their times. And in all the time I’ve been doing this there has only been a finite number of images to enliven because (to paraphrase Will Rogers reason on why it’s a good bet to buy land) “They ain’t makin’ anymore.” Read the rest of this entry »