mNACTEC's daguerreotypes

The Duran daguerreotype collection is one of the most outstanding collections of the Spanish State, both for the quality and diversity of their parts and the authors who are represented. It was compiled by photographer Carles Duran Torrens (1911-2001) and donated in 1984 by Kodak, home owner at the time of collection, to the Generalitat de Catalunya. From that moment it became part of the endowment guarded by the Museu de la Ciència i de la Tècnica de Catalunya..

Daguerreotypes were direct positive of chamber, and therefore of those unique pieces could not make copies. Consisted on a sheet of silver plated copper on one of its faces, it was applied after a process to make it photosensitive. The plates were initially very insensitive and exposure times were very high. But the first steps were swift, and soon appeared bromide as accelerating agent in sensitizing the plates and marketing of a new type of lens, the latter thanks to the design of the Hungarian mathematician József Miksa Petzval. Petzval first used numerical computation to build a set of lens with a large aperture. These optics have an immediate success and would be known popularly as Petzval type. These goals would be essential for over half a century for the realization of portraits.

Since its appearance, the picture was welcomed widely by the bourgeoisie as a means of representation, to the detriment of other more expensive systems like miniature oil portrait, common among the aristocracy. With the development of other photographic techniques during the 1840s, the daguerreotype was reserved almost exclusively to portraiture, and more particularly the portrait of society in which the members of the burgeoning middle class are made to appear with an image of respectability, with which they want to highlight the professional success and prestige social.