[Dessin-Fumée - Fantaisie]

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre's successful diorama involved effects of light passing through life-sized translucent paintings. His captivation in the properties of light can also be found in a series of small drawings he made in 1827 using a process he called "dessin-fumée," which can be translated loosely as "drawing in smoke." The drawings may actually have been created with the smoke from a lit candle that was manipulated to create effects resembling light and shadow. This process is notable for the way atmospheric and linear effects are unified homogenously.

The very same year that Daguerre made this dessin-fumé, he became aware of Nicéphore Niépce's experiments with light-sensitive materials to record scenes from the real world and exchanged one of his dessin-fumée drawings for one of Niépce's engraved pewter plates. The pewter plates were made with one of Niépce's earliest experimental methods from the 1820s. Only one of Niépce's photographic images on pewter still exists today. It is housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Niépce and Daguerre eventually agreed to collaborate, signing an agreement in 1829. The biggest challenge they had to overcome was to find a way to "fix" the image; in other words, they needed to stop the chemicals' reaction to light so that the image did not progressively become darker and darker any time it was viewed in the light until it was obliterated. Their combined efforts would evolve into the daguerreotype process. (See 84.XT.953 for an explanation of the daguerreotype process)

Adapted from Weston Naef, The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collection (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 7. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.